Country Fried
by snapcakes
Summary: Nick/Ellis. What happens on the Lagniappe, stays on the Lagniappe. Maybe. Or not. Language, violence, heavy slash. Really earns that M rating. Ongoing.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:** This chapter was previously released on LiveJournal in December 2009, meaning a (very) few L4D2 slash fans will have seen it before, at least in name. This version is identical to the original posting. The same applies to Chapter Two, posted January 2010. I'm uploading duplicates here because I'm considering using FFN exclusively (with the exception of my own fic journal) for _Country Fried_ in the future, for the sake of convenience.

**Important: **Every word here written is for Jaej, the best person breathing on either side of the Mason/Dixon line. Tremble with fearful awe before her excellence, lest you be banished back to your home on Whore Island.

Country Fried

Chapter One

The steel door slammed, cleanly severing the topmost joint of a once-human finger—a memento of the grey-green hand groping after Coach's trundling form as he bowled into the safehouse. The tiny hunk of mottled flesh took flight, flipped once, twice, and landed neatly in Rochelle's hair. Nick picked it off and flicked it back to its owner, still gabbling with rage behind the bars. Too exhausted to notice or comment upon this brief act of chivalry, Rochelle dropped the bar on the door and threw herself into the nearest corner. Similarly disinterested in thanks, Nick limped off to find a first aid kit. Dismemberment was an old friend of theirs.

"That was fuckin' brutal, y'all," Ellis panted, already doing battle with a fresh and stubborn hermetic seal. He was trying to disinfect a gash on his leg with an assault rifle tucked under his arm. "Fuck-in' brutal." It was the first time he'd sounded even the least bit terrorized since they started their walking tour of the American South; Rochelle made a mental note to be concerned when she could stand up again. She was just about to tell the boy to put the goddamned gun down already—sweetly, if she could manage—when Nick muttered something-dumbass-something and took over. She'd have made some crack to herself about what a chore it must be for Nick to handle a strapping young thigh, but her head was still too full of screaming alarms and sprinting hordes.

It was nice to feel enclosed for a few minutes, her back and sides covered, nothing in front of her but worn carpet and peeling wallpaper. An amusement park is a shit place to be in a zombie apocalypse, they all agreed. Too many small, flimsy structures to hide lurking horrors, enough doorless bathrooms to pack a town's worth of Zombie Surprise into a few square miles, and animal shit lying around to add insult and inflammation to injury. At least there had been enough careless Vicodin and oxycodone addicts in the area to keep their battered bodies flush with forgotten painkillers. She was just glad none of the natives had left their crystal meth lying around instead. They'd been desperate enough once or twice, and things could've gotten a lot uglier.

Rochelle dozed a little while Coach made folksy remarks about food and bonded with Ellis over their mutual manlove for some bearded cellmate rock band. Ellis tried to tell another Keith story—this one time, he and his buddy Keith went to a Midnight Riders concert and Keith decided to try stagediving, only he didn't know that they were just about to light the fireworks shit—and Nick took his turn at shutting him up.

They'd blocked the door to hide themselves or their scent or whateverthefuck it was that zombies found so attractive—assuming infection regressed a person to a toddler's sense of object permanence—and slowly but surely, the gravelly screams and moans faded as the horde dispersed. A witch wandered past the turnstiles a few minutes later; her wails made everyone's skin prickle until the sun went down and she took her weeping and gnashing of teeth elsewhere.

"Dinnertime, Ro." Coach tossed a bag of pretzels onto Rochelle's lap, followed by a can of orange soda on the steel shelf next to her. "Sorry there ain't no beer or nothin' to go with it. Slim pickings out there now. Ellis and I just grabbed shit outta the machine." Rochelle barely stopped herself from rubbing her eyes with bloody fingers.

"That's fine, Coach, thanks," she mumbled, trying to shake herself awake. "Got a wet nap?" She'd meant it as a joke, already hunting for a semi-clean spot on her jeans to wipe her hands, but Ellis materialized in front of her, beaming over a bottle of Purell and a packet of baby wipes.

"Found 'em in the office-thing bathrooms," he announced, glowing with pride. "I figured it'd be better if we weren't all slurpin' zombie guts off our fingers for breakfast." Lovely. Rochelle quashed that image with immediate and extreme prejudice, but gratefully accepted the supplies and set to scrubbing the unspeakable off her hands. It might not kill the sprawling empire of B-horror bacteria surely springing up all over her, but at least she wouldn't have to look at the shit.

"Good /work/, Ellis!" She smiled at him and he beamed a little brighter.

He really was the sweetest thing. Charming as a doll and— occasionally— dumb as a brick. When they first met, she took him for your average beer-slugging redneck, the kind who'd need at least one solid pop in the mouth before long, probably over some form of the "I banged a black chick once" story. She'd met enough of the type since she'd been in Georgia, mostly in the pool of cocksure townie pricks hired to lug cables around in the field. But Ellis had been different, and her assessment of him had transformed from yokel to affable dunce to a sweet but dense little brother in the course of a few short but never-ending days. He'd even said the words "aww, shucks" once when she'd hugged him. Aww fucking shucks, without the tiniest bit of irony. It was almost intolerably cute.

As the current bearer of baby wipes, Rochelle became the focal point of a loose circle of exhausted and bloody bodies, collapsed on the carpet around her. Each of them took their turn with the too-fragrant wipes and sanitizer and tore into their meager supplies. Rochelle moved a pretzel around her mouth with her tongue, sucking on the salt while surveyed the ragtag bunch. There was Ellis, of course, the perky, drawling greasemonkey who'd won her heart, more or less. Nick sat beside him and directly across from her, their resident hooker with a heart of gold. Or some skeazy male equivalent thereof. He was a complete dick, to be sure, and a lot shadier than she'd be comfortable with in a sane world. But apocalypse-inspired camaraderie had a way of bringing out the softer side in even the most hardened jerkoffs. He'd saved her ass countless times already and sometimes made an effort to be friendly. He even made a few stabs at giving a shit when Coach and Ellis had started fawning over the Midnight Riders poster.

Coach, now grumbling into a bag of chips like they had broken in transit just to piss him off, was a decent guy. Again, in the world of a few weeks ago, she'd have found his salt-of-the-earth fat guy shtick and the simple fact that he referred to himself as "Coach" close to insufferable, but zombies change everything. During their quieter moments, she still sometimes felt like she was the only real person left on Earth, surrounded by cartoons and caricature personalities, but they'd been good to her and kept each other alive. It was the best you could hope for, these days.

Zombies change everything.

When she tuned back into the conversation, they were talking about the witch. "Bitch is lucky she shut the fuck up," Ellis was saying. "I was just about to go out there m'self and put a bullet in that mouth of hers. Damn, I hate them things." His shudder was badly concealed.

"Oh, that would've been fantastic." Nick rolled his eyes. "We finally get to a safe room and you go out and get yourself mauled by a zombie on her period. It's not like we /need/ the extra medkits or anything."

"Hey, man, I'm a crack fuckin' shot, ok?" Ellis protested. "I coulda done it." He mimed firing a shotgun into an invisible witch's skull. "Ka-POW! 1000 badass points, right there. Y'all should see me shoot skeet. I fuckin' made it RAIN clay. Course sometimes we used my mama's old dinner plates when she went n' got a new set from the Wal-Mart and didn't want the old ones no more. 'Cept this one time me and my buddy Keith got 'em mixed up and got all this shit outta the kitchen..."

"Later, Ellis," Coach warned, momentarily distracted from his rapidly diminishing share of snack food.

"Okay."

Rochelle was pretty sure they stopped the Keith stories out of habit by now. God knows he was a decent multitasker when it came to talking and shooting, but it was probably best for everyone if he didn't tell one of them with his mouth full of pretzel. It was hard enough to work up an appetite covered in semi-human remains. Nick seemed to be having a harder time than the rest of them; he was still meticulously picking gunk out from under his surprisingly well-manicured nails. Rochelle couldn't decide if this had more to do with his habits as a sleek and deliberate (probable) conman or the fact that the man was gayer than springtime.

Or Christmas or rainbows or fairy dust or any of those combined. There were plenty of straight men overly concerned with their clothes and hair, but she had the most finely-tuned gaydar in the Midwest. The evidence had been piling up from day one, but really, she'd known from the first time Nick threw her a barbed little "sweetheart." She recognized it instantly. Rochelle didn't give two shits as to which set of equipment Nick preferred to play with, but it did make for a few entertaining exchanges. He knew she knew and vice versa, and more than one guileless comment from Ellis had led to stifled snorts and withering sideways looks.

Sweet little Ellis. She liked to think he wouldn't care if he knew about Nick's preferences, however bred in the Bible Belt he'd been, but she couldn't help imagining his face if anyone ever bothered to explain what a prime piece of gaybait he really was.

And oh, did Nick struggle to ignore that bait. Regardless of his feelings toward whatshisname—Ricky Bobby or whatever—Ellis was the absolute paragon of football-tossing, wrench-twiddling, alphabet-burping, country-fried heterosexuality. As if to underline this point, Ellis shotgunned the rest of his soda and let loose a most impressive belch.

Coach guffawed and then quickly remembered himself with a, "Not in front of a lady, Ellis," just as Nick said, "Very attractive, Cletus," and Rochelle snorted orange soda up her nose. She coughed and hacked for a minute while Ellis patted her on the back, apologizing profusely, then got up and stretched her aching limbs. They were good for distractions, these three. It was easier to ignore the death waiting outside when they took stage.

"Well, boys, I think that's my cue to retire," she announced, folding herself under a table and bashing in a cardboard box for a pillow. "I'm taking a nap. Wake me in a couple of hours, would you?"

--*--

*/One more word and I'll punch him in the mouth. I don't fucking care what they do about it. I'll fucking punch him. One more word./*

Nick strapped a bottle of pills to his hip and /waited/.

Alas, Ellis was finished bemoaning the loss of their fucking zombie pilot. Nick was almost disappointed. Losing the helicopter and surviving a crash landing had been enough of a pain in the ass. The last thing he needed was to listen to Junior bitching him out for using goddamn fucking common sense. That kid pushed his luck like nobody's business. God help him if he even /breathed/ the word "Keith."

Once the others finished gearing up, Nick ducked out of the supply shed and led the way onto the street. Apart from the weathered remnants of zombie battles past, the silence was almost serene. It crawled up his spine and dug into the base of his neck, knotting the muscles there. They'd learned the hard way to be wary of peace and quiet. The most insignificant goddamn noises seemed to echo in silent streets like this, attracting all manner of zombie shit storms.

They made their way down the only route available to them, walking on eggshells and twitching at shadows. Nick had just drawn breath to make a suggestion when they heard it—one of those mutant one-armed freaks was close, and it was coming for them. Fuck. Chargers weren't as big as the tank-sized monsters they'd seen, but neither did they have the life-saving, 'roid rage ADD of the bigger zombie jocks. These things were huge and fast and they were /persistent/. Fuck.

The four survivors circled, desperately trying to locate the source of the big retard's roar. Nick heard the rumbling footsteps too late. The motherfucker came out of /nowhere/ and plowed straight through their defensive knot, sending every last one of them flying like ragdolls. Nick scrambled to his feet, the air knocked out of his lungs and stars dancing in his eyes. He'd gotten lucky this time, landing just a foot short of a small but nastily jagged rock.

The gun was barely back in his hands when he heard Ellis screaming. Shit. Nick whirled around unsteadily. Rochelle had landed badly; she was still fumbling to right herself. None of that cheeseburger and donut padding had done Coach any favors, either. He was even further down the street than Nick, swearing and looking for his weapons. Triple shit.

Nick was already firing as he ran at the Charger. The damn thing wouldn't /die/ and Ellis was still screaming and fuck shit fuck, if only that fucking pilot hadn't been so fucking stupid, stupid fucking zombie fuck, fuck. The creature went down, nearly collapsing on top of Ellis' prone form on the pavement. He could hear Coach shouting his way back to them—goddamn idiot, like they hadn't made enough noise already—and Rochelle was already closing in, but Nick was lost in visions of broken spines and cracked ribs and punctured lungs. Fucking idiot kid, getting pinned like that, what the fuck, it could've been any of them but it /had/ to be him because he was a stupid, cocky little shit who fucking tempted fate with his goddamn idiot bullshit, it was enough to—

"Ellis? Ellis! Damn it, kid. Can you move?" He wasn't too badly hurt. Naturally. Goddamn brat had supernatural luck. It was just like him to make everybody freak the fuck out for nothing. "Are you ok? Sit still. Jesus." Nick would've sworn on his mother's grave that ten minutes had passed since he'd heard the first scream, but the relative lack of mutilation before him said otherwise. Ellis was banged up from head to toe, but the fence had done more damage than the zombie itself. Nick gave him a few pills and forced him back to the ground. "I said sit still! I can't do this if you're squirming all over the place."

Ellis grinned up at him like a battered jackass. "Aw, Nick, I knew you cared," he rasped, coughing to catch his breath. Nick resisted the urge to smack his split lip. Before he could muster a sufficiently scathing reply, Rochelle was kneeling beside the two of them, checking Ellis for breaks.

"Ellis, sweetie, are you ok? Damn, you scared us." Christ, if he were a few years younger, she'd probably adopt him. Dress him in Redneck OshKosh and feed him with little rubber spoons. As it was, she was almost petting him like a scared kitten.

You'd think a strutting little bastard like Ellis would try to brush that kind of shit off, but no. Then again, he probably still slept in footie pajamas. Nick watched him lap up the attention with mild disgust, slapping a bandage on one of Ellis' cuts with overly brisk efficiency. */Don't get your hopes up, kid. Mama Rochelle isn't giving up any of that action to her baby./*

And now not even his most fervent efforts could shake the mental image of Rochelle carrying Ellis around in a Baby Bjorn. Son of a bitch.

Once Rochelle was finished babying the kid, Coach hauled him to his feet and slapped him on the back—Nick swallowed an automatic protest of whacking a recently injured man with those canned ham hands—and they moved ahead together, exchanging some jocular Georgian banter about fried food or tractors or whatever. Nick wasn't paying attention. Hunger and stress were making him bitchy, and he was watching the shadows again.

Or was trying to, when Rochelle sidled up next to him. Relief had added a little bounce to her step and a twinkle in her eye that he found instantly irritating.

"That was sweet of you, worrying about Ellis like that," she said with a thinly veiled smirk. "You're a nice guy when you forget about your suit." She patted his shoulder with her free hand. Nick looked down at her, his mouth set in a hard line.

"Rochelle, I'm in no mood." Her eyes went wide with feigned innocence.

"Hey, I just wanted to thank you for looking out," she replied, removing her hand from his shoulder and holding it open. "I'm just glad you stuck with us, Nick." That, at least, was genuine, so he gave her a noncommittal hey-no-problem shrug and kept his eyes fixed on the road. He saw her smile at him from the corner of his eye. He caught sight of an old man vomiting brains under a tree, but she raised her pistol and beat him to it. Her smirk was back the second brains hit dirt.

--*--

There was no electricity in the drainage pipe, but some wonderful bastard had left a gas-powered lantern inside. They'd left it burning a reasonable distance from the ammo dump, unwilling to give themselves up to the dark in this stinking refuge. Coach had worn himself out fighting off a tongue and passed out as soon as his ass hit the floor. Rochelle was tucked up in a corner as usual, dozing fitfully.

And then there were two.

Leaning into the light, Ellis was putting his NRA membership to good use, checking out the weapons they'd scavenged from the site, cleaning what he could. Nick tossed aside his ancient issue of People—seriously, fuck Jennifer Aniston—and watched. He could handle a gun himself, but he was more acquainted with bats than firearms and had never been all that concerned with maintenance. When he'd been handed a gun in the past, it definitely wasn't for keeps. Anyway, it was fascinating to see Ellis actually /concentrating/ on something. This was probably what it'd be like to see Coach eating a salad.

Ellis noticed his audience and grinned. The click of the now-reassembled pistol in his hand was ominously cheerful. He picked up his pack—a neon pink fannypack he'd found in the hotel that had brought the others fucking /endless/ mirth when they'd noticed it, though none of the ribbing had fazed Ellis in the least—and moved to sit next to Nick, who unconsciously shifted a few inches away. Undaunted, Ellis produced a stick of heavily processed, meat-like material and handed it to him.

"Snap into a Slim Jim, man. I got extras." Nick had sworn off that kind of cheap shit white trash food as soon as he could afford better, but he doubted he'd see another steak for a while yet. He didn't want to hurt the dumb kid's feelings, anyway. After the day—days—they'd all had, it'd be too much like kicking a puppy. Or a baby hound dog. Whatever.

He tore the wrapper open with his teeth, spitting a wad of gristle and plastic and pasteurized cheese onto the floor. It figured Ellis would want to bond over sticks of meat—god damn it. That was Rochelle's fault. He chewed with dogged determination, blocking out memories of her past insinuations. "Thanks, kid."

"Sure thing, bro," Ellis replied around a chunk of jerky. He swallowed and looked at Nick, suddenly serious. "Hey, man, thanks for before. Gettin' that pounder freak offa me n' all. I ain't gonna lie, that shit hurt. And when I saw all y'all knocked on your asses I kinda panicked, y'know? There ain't shit you can do when one of those motherfuckers got you pinned. Scared the shit out of me." Nick tactfully refrained from pointing out that, given their last few run-ins, Ellis probably should've been used to getting a beatdown from the specially mutated freaks. He just gave the kid a little knock on the shoulder and shook his head.

"Anybody would've done it," he said. "We've all got each other's backs." Which was true, for some reason. "You don't have to thank me." Ellis grinned at him again. He still looked like a jackass, but Nick was getting used to it.

"You're a good guy, Nick."

Ah fuck, they were having a Moment.

It was already too late to stop what was coming— Ellis had him swept up in a big honkytonk bear hug before he could blink. There was a lot of muscle under that douchebag T-shirt; he nearly crushed the air out of Nick's lungs. Nick gave him an obliging pat and tried to pull away. As soon as he managed an inch of breathing room, a sucking, tearing noise ripped up from between their parting bodies.

Apparently it was just humid enough in the swamp to loosen the dried shit on their clothes into a paste. Pressed up against each other like that, distressed cotton and Italian silk had formed an unholy union, bound by blood and bile. They had to literally peel themselves away from each other to sit back. Ellis snorted. "Shit, that's gross."

"It is that," Nick agreed, envisioning all the zeroes on the credit invoice he'd signed for this shirt. "Pretty fucking gross."

Awkward sticky moment aside, they sat together in amiable silence, just outside the lamp's steady pool of light. Nick finished about half of his meat and cheese stick before returning it to Ellis, who decided to save the rest of his, too. Given a little protein and a few minutes of useable silence, Nick's general irritation with Ellis started to seem a bit irrational, even to him. Stress and bullshit had a way of bringing out his more intensely misanthropic side.

Hordes of infected or undead or whatever the fuck constantly swarming around them definitely ranked high on the stress and bullshit meter, to say nothing of how long it'd been since he'd been laid, paid, and properly fed. Christ knew there was no fixing any of that here. Zombies were just a fact of life at the moment, the casinos had gone dark, and his only human companionship came in the form of non-options, to say the least—fat (and old and straight), female (a handful of bar chicks and one miserable marriage had cured him of that curiosity), and Ellis (the name, he felt, said it all).

*/Might as well loosen up and make the best of things,/* Nick thought, leaning back against the ridged wall of the pipe. */The faster we get ourselves out of this shit, the – /* He felt a soft thump on his shoulder. Ellis was snoring softly against him, his face unperturbed and bizarrely angelic under a crown of flattened hat hair. Nick opened his mouth to say something, to wake him up and make him go cuddle his adoptive mommy instead, but the quiet peace of the sleeping jackass' face stopped him short. The kid was barely old enough to drink, but he'd handled himself well. He deserved some undisturbed, mouthbreathing rest.

Nick tried to find a comfortable angle against the wall to get some sleep himself, but the steel ribs made it difficult to settle in. He couldn't move away without waking Ellis. He heaved a sigh and looked back down at his shoulder. A tiny droplet of drool glistened at the corner of Ellis' mouth, certainly a herald of greater torrents to come.

Son of a bitch.

--*--

"Well, don't y'all look cute." The smirking drawl integrated itself incomprehensibly into a dream of firecrackers and an old lady from a late night horror movie, until it came again, "Two peas in a butt-ugly pod. C'mon, boys, time t' get a move on." Ellis mmprhmed and mmrgled his way back to the waking world, gradually aware that he was warm and comfortable except for a tiny crick in his neck. He opened his eyes to see Coach standing over him, looking especially amused and massive with a shotgun slung over his shoulder. It finally occurred to him that he'd fallen asleep on Nick's shoulder, and that Nick's head had toppled over on top of his before he could shove him off. Fucking awww. Better yet, Ellis had turned and cuddled a little closer in his sleep. Probably made one hell of a homo-tastic scene. He grinned sleepily up at Coach and didn't move.

"Y'all're just jealous 'cause y'all slept on the floor and here we are, cute as puppies in a fuckin' basket. C'mere, Ro, you wanna cuddle, too? It's all right, this here's a survival situation!" As expected, "puppies in a basket" took the wind right out of Coach's sails and he walked off to load up on ammo, muttering something about getting on the road before dark. Rochelle was trying hard not to laugh, so Ellis egged her on. "It's body heat, girl! This here's how they do it in the wilderness! Ain't that right, Nick?" Nick had just snapped awake and was trying to play it cool.

"Right. The wilderness. Camping or something." He was still too sleepy-stupid to pull it off, rubbing his neck and getting up on his knees first so he wouldn't fall over.

"I think you have to take your clothes off for that, Nick," Rochelle said, and ooh, did Nick give her a look. Rochelle was one funny chick. Ellis winked at her and she laughed all cute, but then got kind of a weird look on her face, which he chalked up to being tired or thinking about something else. Probably zombies. He thought a lot about zombies, too.

Ellis stretched and hauled himself up off the floor. It was already late afternoon, the sun slanting and murky on the muddy water outside. They'd slept a whole day away, goddamnit. It was probably best they all got the sleep, but damn. It's not like they didn't have somewhere to be. Maybe. Hopefully. Whatever! Now wasn't the time to be thinking like that. There'd be people in a town somewhere close and they could point them in the right direction and /this/ time Nick wouldn't shoot the pilot or whoever came along. Everything was gonna be OK. Ellis stuck the barrel of a hunting rifle through the door and shot a mudman in the face to prove his point. Everything was hunky fucking dory.

"In retrospect, couldn't we have just walked /around/ the plane?"

"It was all blocked by shit! Anyway, we're all ok, ain't we? So it was kind of fun, right, like a movie about zombies on an airplane or some shit! I'd watch that movie. That movie'd kick ass!"

"This isn't a movie, Ellis. One of us could've been seriously hurt. And if we'd run out of ammo..."

"It's a moot fuckin' point now, Nick, so let it the fuck go."

"All right, fine. I was just saying." He closed his mouth damn quick. It was kind of cute how Nick acted when Coach shut him up, all intimidated like a little kid. Ellis grinned at him and Nick didn't look too happy about it, which was kind of cute, too. Now, just how he might react to being called "cute" and all, that might not be so cute, but it was damn funny to think about.

"Hey, did I ever tell y'all about the first time my buddy Keith rode on an airplane? His grandma had just moved to Houston and he was on his way to visit her, and he'd never flown before but he'd heard about the Mile High Club in the movies and shit, so Keith decides that sounds like his kinda club and he wants to join up. Only he didn't have nobody on the plane with him, so like mid-flight he goes back to the bathroom and—"

"Not now, Ellis."

"Okay."

Too bad for them. That one was a good story.

--*--


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Notes:** Thanks to the ever-wonderfultastic nekocrouton LJ for beta reading chapters 2-3 for me. It should be noted that any errors found within are my own oversight, not hers.

**PSA: **If you have five dollars and Jaej has five dollars, she has more money than you.

Country Fried

Chapter Two

Village en Marais was nothing but a goddamn ghost town. Or a zombie town. Probably a zombie town was a better word for it, because there were plenty of zombies and they probably used to be the people that lived there, so it wasn't really /abandoned/, which of course is how you make a real ghost town, by up and leaving it. Either way, it was a sore fucking disappointment.

"I don't know about this, guys," Rochelle said, knocking on the walls of the safehouse. "This place doesn't look all that sturdy."

"Take a nap, Ro," Ellis told her. "You seen them things try to get through a door? We could stay here a week before anything'd get through tiny li'l gaps like that."

"He's right, honey. At least sit down for a while." Nick double-checked the bolts on the door. "We'll get moving as soon as it's light out."

Nick only called Rochelle "honey" when he thought they were going to die soon, but Ellis still thought it was sweet. He liked when Nick and Rochelle were nice to each other. Usually hanging out with those two was like being around Keith and his little sister—like, Keith'd kick anybody's ass who fucked with Kelly, but otherwise they were half the time needling each other's nerves and making passive-aggressive remarks and shit. It was funny sometimes, but other times you just wanted them to shut the fuck up and go back to being buddies.

Rochelle softened up just like Kelly did when her brother sweet talked her. She didn't say anything, just shrugged and curled up in a corner and dumped water out of her boots. Everybody followed her lead. They were all pretty damn squishy. Nick looked at his shoes like he'd just pulled a couple of dead rats off his feet.

"Of all days to wear suede, I picked Zombie Armageddon." They did look a lot more beat to shit than everybody else's. Rochelle gave them a sympathetic look.

"You were having an off day. Suede shoes during the apocalypse, a white suit after Labor Day… you were screwed from the second you unzipped that garment bag." Nick just snorted and pulled off his socks. Hell, it was /exactly/ like being around Keith and his little sister.

--*--

Ellis never slept much in safehouses. He knew it'd catch up to him eventually, but he couldn't help it. They made him twitchy. It was mostly the writing on the walls, especially the desperate notes to family members. He'd been trying hard not to think about a lot of things and having a bunch of scribbled reminders staring him in the face ruined it.

It wasn't right what had happened to everybody. A virus or whateverthefuck getting into them, killing their brains, pushing them out of their own damn bodies and making them do all that vile shit. Ellis only thought about surviving when he was in the middle of a fight, but later on he was proud of himself and the others for doing right by the people who used to be inside. If his body got taken over like that, rotting and mutating to where he couldn't ever come back, he'd sure as shit want somebody to kill the thing left behind. That didn't mean he wanted to think about who the monsters used to be. It didn't matter. A zombie was a zombie. Gotta kill zombies.

He stared through the barred window, trying to ignore the noise of the graffiti, watching shambling forms move in distant shadows. His fingers itched for a hunting rifle. But the others were still asleep, so instead he fantasized about building a robot suit and mowing down all the zombies in the world with big-ass laser guns. Also he had a jet pack and could fly. It was awesome.

Someone coughed behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and, lo and behold, it was Nick, staring at his back. Ellis grinned. Poor bastard would never learn. He tried to pretend he'd just then looked over in Ellis' direction, like he'd just noticed Ellis was even there. He was never any good at playing that shit off. Maybe he only got his game face on when he was playing for money.

Nick predictably scooted a few inches away when Ellis sat down beside him. This shit just never got old.

"Can't sleep?"

"Not really. It's hard to stay asleep under four inches of shit-stink mud."

"Yeah, we are pretty rank." Ellis plucked at his crusty T-shirt. "I pretty much stopped noticin', though."

"I thought you liked mud."

"I like it better when you can take a shower after."

"Hah, showers. Remember those?"

"I'm tellin' you right now, the first one I see I'm movin' into for a week. It'll take that long to make sure there ain't no more Boomer puke or nothin' on me. Course I'll come outta there wrinkled like a fuckin' California raisin, so maybe after I can join a circus or somethin'."

Nick actually laughed a little bit. Ellis had a story all lined up about the time his buddy Keith went to the circus and tried to steal an elephant, but he kept it to himself so Nick wouldn't have to tell him "not now" and would keep on almost-smiling.

"Listen, Ellis," Nick said, serious business all over again. "I know I've been giving you a lot of shit. You know I'm just joking, right? It's my thing, or whatever."

Yep, he was pretty much convinced they were going to die. Ellis couldn't really blame him. The big infested-ass mall, the crash, the zombie ghost town; nothing they'd run into inspired much optimism. But still.

"Man, shut the fuck up, all right?" Ellis gave him a light shove with his shoulder. "Everything's gonna be fine, don't go tyin' up loose ends. Anyway, I know you're a good guy n' all. You don't gotta tell me nothin'."

Nick looked at him like he'd just thrown away his drool cup and started solving differential equations, but all he said was, "Ok, kid, whatever you say."

"You want me to snooze on your shoulder? You seem to sleep OK when I do." Ellis tried to keep a straight face and failed. Horribly.

"I don't think I could take the smell."

"Whatever, man. I think I like you better asleep. You're cuddlier when you're unconscious."

"You're quite the comedian after hours."

"Who's jokin'? Hillbillies need love, too." Nick rolled his eyes. He was obviously too tired to be baited. "Ok, fine. You don't wanna cuddle, let's play a game. I spy with my little eye something that begins with W."

"The wall."

"Bingo! Shit, you're good. Your turn."

Nick was quiet for a long time. "I spy something that begins with T."

"You have to say it right."

"Fine. I spy with my little eye something that begins with T."

"The table."

"You got it."

"I'm a fuckin' I Spy champion, you watch. I spy with my little eye something… white. Or used t'be."

"My suit."

The game went on until Nick nodded off, trying to find something yellow in the dark. Ellis won by default, still a fucking champion.

--*--

"What the fuck is attracting them?!" Nick strained to be heard over the clatter of the mounted gun. The tide of infected showed no sign of ebbing. They poured over the walls of the garden, clawed their way through locked doors, swarmed from all angles of God knows where. There were no alarms or fireworks this time—all they'd done was use a goddamned CB radio. It was as if the zombies were controlled by a single, malevolent consciousness, intent on extinguishing every last spark of human life. Maybe they could sense hope. Or maybe God was just fucking with them all.

Even without the big gun, the collective roar was deafening. Someone had made their last stand on the second floor of the plantation house, leaving behind an enormous supply of CEDA jars and ammunition. The survivors had bolted for the failed stronghold as soon as it became clear that the shitstorm wasn't letting up. Nick doubted they'd see the first floor again.

"Maybe our asses smell like apple pie. Damned if I know," Coach called back, shooting out the kneecaps of a fresh horde coming up the stairs. "But this shit's gotta stop soon or we're all good n' fucked."

Ellis shouted a warning and they scrambled out of the blast radius of a dying Boomer, barely escaping the shower of bile as it exploded under Ellis' bullet. The mutant freaks were out in force. Rochelle had lost a patch of hair to a Jockey and the soles of Nick's shoes were already thinned by half from Spitter acid baths. It seemed they were up against the entire population of that shitty little town, plus all their friends and relatives and anyone they'd ever bumped into at a county fair. Fucking ridiculous.

And then they came. Two massive Tanks, made indistinguishable by their deformity, surged onto the grounds. One was at the front door in seconds. The other was quickly on its way, swatting aside the smaller infected like flies. They could hear pounding footsteps on the stairs just as the second Tank inexplicably shoved itself through a window on the first floor, shattering piles of furniture with confused rage. They were utterly exposed, a full story off the ground with no way down. One swing and they would all be knocked out past the drive, backs broken, skulls split.

"WE HAVE TO RUN! DROP OFF THE EDGE!" Coach ran to the edge of the balcony and slid off to demonstrate, dangling by his hands for a beat before falling to the porch below. He winced at the landing, but recovered fast. "NOW! C'MON!" The first Tank had broken the stairs and fallen back, buying the survivors a few precious seconds. It was already climbing back up the railing.

Rochelle whipped herself over the edge and fell. Coach saw her coming and caught her around the waist before she landed, still hollering up for Nick and Ellis. The remaining two moved in near-unison, taking the dizzying slide off the ledge and grabbing onto the jutting boards at the same time.

Nick had just let go when he heard the scream. Startled, he landed hard, nearly wrenching his ankle as he overbalanced. Ellis landed on top of him like a sack of cement, a Hunter clinging to his back. Blood and bone spattered Nick's face as the creature's skull exploded, its claws still poised to rend the flesh from Ellis' neck. Coach shoved his pistol into the makeshift holster at his hip and lifted Nick and Ellis bodily off the steps, shoving them in the direction of the gates.

"MOVE!"

Ellis was hobbling badly; the fall had fucked up his leg. Nick wrapped an arm around Ellis' waist and hauled him alongside, struggling to stay inside the circle cleared by Coach and Rochelle's cover fire. The gates ahead were locked tight. They'd have to climb somehow, maybe use the table, if it would hold any of them—

The gates exploded, staggering the four survivors. Heat singed Nick's eyebrows and pulled his face taut. Chunks of debris landed mere inches from their feet, still running at the burning remains. The smoke began to clear, and the faint outline of a large structure took form out on the water, gradually solidifying into the shape of a mid-sized, honest-to-god boat. A grenade launcher withdrew into the window of the cabin. The guy on the radio hadn't been fucking around.

They were close, but the Tanks were closer and faster. Ellis was still hobbling and his weight was slowing Nick down by half. They'd never make it like this. His only hope was to drop the kid and run for his own damn life. He waited to feel his grip on Ellis' waist loosen.

It didn't. Shit. He couldn't do it. He'd never be able to live with himself. Fuck.

Nick reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a syringe, the last of their scavenged fruits of CEDA's labor. He pulled off the cap with his teeth and plunged the needle straight into Ellis' arm, slamming the plunger down the second he felt needle meet flesh. Ellis howled in pain, swearing violently at Nick before he realized what he'd done.

"RUN. YOU HAVE TO RUN." Nick pulled his arm away and propelled Ellis forward with a hand on the small of his back. Ellis gritted his teeth as the chemicals took effect and sprinted forward unevenly, still favoring his bad leg but moving fast enough to keep up.

The guy on the boat must have had a megaphone. They could hear him over everything else. "Side door! Get in the side door!" Coach and Rochelle landed on the deck first. They turned and hauled the other two onto the boat by arms and collars, Rochelle with incredible and unforeseen strength. A Tank hurled a burning chunk of gate at the craft. It spun over their heads and landed in the water with a huge, hissing splash. "SIDE DOOR!" Pulling and shoving each other forward, the four ran to the open pier-side door and tumbled inside. Coach slammed it shut just as the boat began to steer away. The boatman's laugh boomed triumphantly through the walls, mocking the vexed roar of the thwarted Tank.

It was over.

--*--

As it turned out, their knight in shining armor was a big, bristly man, big enough to make Coach look like a muppet. He materialized below deck in a flurry of Cajun charm, resplendent in a battered fishing hat and an orange KISS THE COOK T-shirt roughly the size of a circus tent. Rochelle liked him instantly. Not just because he'd rescued them from swarming, biting, pounding death, or because he shared his supplies and lent them the warm, dry space of his boat's converted interior. It was the sheer and obvious pleasure he took in being valiant and kind. Virgil was probably the world's last living saint.

He even had a system to clean the mud and gore off of their clothes, stringing them up to dry in the first sunshine that had meant anything in a long time. It was sunshine by proxy, of course. Laundry and anything else that needed doing out in the open was quick, furtive work. Deep water stopped the running and pouncing, but no one was interested in finding out how far a Smoker's tongue could reach.

Travel on the Lagniappe was quicker than walking, but not by much. The inland route to New Orleans was long and winding, hindered by countless post-apocalyptic obstacles: trash, debris, floating thickets of corpses, dangerously narrow banks. Fuel was a constant concern. Nights were spent anchored in the broadest, deepest water they could find. Virgil's stories of night travel by boat were chilling enough that not even Nick complained about the delays.

Impatient as they were to get to an evac point, Rochelle was grateful for the break from gore and grime and hunger and panic. Their infection-free helmsman was a bonus noted by all. Whenever Virgil was out of earshot, Ellis reminded Nick not to shoot him, please and thank you. He seemed to be at least half-joking.

They could still hear the gabbling crazies at night, psychotic bedtime stories from infected wandering near the shore. It kept them up the first night out, rigidly staring at the fragile wooden door with guns close at hand. Virgil found them there the next morning, wired and drawn in a paranoid clump.

It was then that they were introduced to his special "home brew," stashed in a closet and packaged in recycled wine bottles. It was paint stripper laced with honey, strong enough to tranquilize a Tank and just enough to help them sleep. It was glorious.

Things were going quite well, really. And the sleeping arrangements were certainly interesting.

Before the infection hit, Virgil's wife had taken up some home remodeling "for the grandkids." Apart from the little wedge of a bathroom and the kitchen-slash-living-room area, two small bedrooms-of-sorts were tucked into the back. Each room was consumed by a frameless foam mattress, either installed before the walls were built or teleported inside with secret Cajun magic. A hairline crack between mattress and wall ran around three sides, leaving a tiny rectangle of free space between the foot of the bed and the door. Coach had eyed these rooms, undoubtedly picturing his top-heavy frame flailing and wallowing to get in and out. He immediately volunteered to sleep on a cot in the living room.

"Fine by me, Virgil don't like to sleep too far 'way from the perch now'days. This here's all up for grabs for y'all durin' our time. I expect y'all can sort out the arrangements y'selves." Virgil clapped Coach on the back and winked at the rest. "Sure am glad t' see y'all made it in one piece. Go on an' get y'selves situated." He moved with surprising speed and agility through the cramped spaces, disappearing up the stairs as nimbly as a squirrel. The others had looked at each other then, waiting for someone to volunteer.

"Lady's gotta have her own room, 'f course," Ellis had said. "Take your pick, Ro. Me n' Nick can bunk together. He already knows I don't snore, dontcha Nick?" He grinned at Nick, whose expression remained perfectly neutral.

"Sure, yeah. Go ahead, Rochelle. You could probably use a break away from the boys, anyway."

She'd laughed and smiled. "You got that right. I need a safe place to change away from you /menfolk/, anyhow." She knew Nick had had the same idea. He just hadn't wanted to be the first to suggest it.

Rochelle loved Nick.

She was balancing in the tiny rectangle in her room now, changing into a set of borrowed clothes. Virgil had had a family of women once; one of them had been just about her size. They were all gone now. He was happy to see their things to use and she was happy to use them, though she tried not to think about the original owners, not yet. She wanted to be happy for a moment; she wanted to think about love. Maybe she'd meditate over a kitten calendar later. Spend an hour drawing rainbows or something.

But she did love them all, every sweaty, spitting one of them. You'd have to be a harder person than Rochelle to come through all that shit without learning to love the bastards a little. She'd loved Ellis first, of course, because it was easiest. She'd learned to love Coach's stupid food jokes and drawling transparency, and she loved him for treating her like a daughter without treating her like a child.

She'd never given it a conscious thought before. Survival was hungry work, physically and mentally. But now, safe and clean, she realized for the first time that the only thing standing between her and a complete emotional breakdown was this new family, stumbled upon in a hotel elevator.

Nick had taken time. When she'd first scowled at him and ordered him not to be a dick, their very first day together, a little jingle had materialized in her head and lodged there:

*/"Dick" is a nick for a prick.  
Nick is the name of a dick.  
Nick is a prick.  
Nick is a dick.  
Hickory dickory dick./*

She liked to hum it whenever he got on her nerves. The man had a bad attitude. He bitched and moaned at the worst possible times, and all of the snark she would've enjoyed before the infection was ruined by his insistence on being an intolerable fuckhead.

Rochelle hadn't done much to help. A silent exchange of raised eyebrows (from her) and grimacing glares (from him) when she'd caught Nick checking out Ellis in a mall saferoom had amped up their low-level animosity for a time. He'd been such a pain in the ass, she couldn't help the meaningful looks and inelegant snorts when Ellis complained about "backhumpers" or talked about how he always came out on top. It was her only means of repaying him for all the bitchy Downer Debbie bullshit.

But Nick was Nick. You learned to accept it. She'd had time to see the genuine panic in his eyes when one of their people was in danger. She'd watched him soften towards Ellis, his nicknames and harassment becoming affectionate teasing. She'd saved his life and he'd saved hers. Crisis had put a few hairline fractures in his crusty shell, and she'd learned to love him, too.

He deserved a break, Rochelle decided. She made a silent vow to not to give Nick any unnecessary shit for bunking with Ellis, however tempted she may be.

"GOD DAMN IT," she heard him roar from outside. "Who the fuck left a fucking open juicebox here? Ellis, I'm looking at you. This isn't fucking funny! I just got squirted—" blah blah blah.

Christ. It wasn't going to be easy.

--*--

"UNO, MOTHERFUCKERS!" Coach slapped his card down with a crow of triumph. "/Hell/ yeah. I'm unstoppable, ladies. Uuunstoppable."

"Don't get too excited, now," Rochelle warned, taking her turn. "You have to get rid of that last one to win." Coach's triumphant glow dimmed a little.

Nick snorted over his cards. He'd lost interest when everyone refused to make the game "a little more interesting," but he was hanging out to be sociable, which was nice, even if he was just throwing shit down at random. Ellis could see every card in his hand, hanging loose the way it was.

Nick put down a green 5. "Uno." He only had a wild card left, but Coach was running lucky and would probably beat him to it. Ellis pulled the card he'd been saving for just this occasion.

"Reverse. Your turn again, Nick."

"Hah!" Nick threw his final card down with a flourish. He sure looked interested now. "I win." He grinned at Coach. "Ladies."

"Aw, Ellis, what the fuck?"

Ellis shrugged apologetically and shuffled his hand back into the deck. "Sorry, man, I play what I got. Rematch?"

Coach grunted assent and pointed at Nick. "This time I'ma whoop your ass." He gathered up the cards and dealt again.

With a little help from Ellis, Rochelle handed out the ass whooping instead, clearing out her hand in just a few turns. Nick came in dead last, holding what looked like half the deck once everyone else had finished, which of course pleased Coach enough to keep him in the game. Once the next round was dealt, Ellis went to work.

Coach was too busy swearing at his cards to notice what was going on, but Nick caught on after his third consecutive win. Ellis played dumb when Nick raised an eyebrow in his direction, shrugging and commenting on his own shit luck. Nick shook his head and laughed. He looked impressed.

He dropped his fourth winning card and picked himself up off the floor. "I win again. Ok, folks, that's it for me." He smiled wickedly down at Coach. "Nice playing with y'all."

"You're a damn card shark or somethin', I don't even know." Coach eyed Nick like he was hiding wild cards up his sleeve. Ellis heaved a great big sigh and stood up, too.

"I'm out. The Mattel gods ain't smiling on me today. Y'all're gonna clean me out before long."

"Well, we can't play with just two." Rochelle quickly scooped up the pile of cards and slid them back into the box, obviously not all that torn up about ending the game. "And Ellis, sweetie, I don't know what Nick told you, but we weren't playing for any money."

"That don't mean it ain't /emotionally/ taxin' to lose so much! I'm fuckin' exhausted!" He put a dramatic hand to his chest while Rochelle laughed, then grabbed an issue of an old hot rod magazine and wandered back into his room. He heard Coach announce that he was going up to talk to his new buddy and get away from damn card sharks.

He had just stretched out and settled in when the door opened. Nick sat on the edge of the mattress, moving to take off his jacket until he remembered it was still drying out up top. "That was one hell of a streak you were on back there." Ellis kept his face hidden, flipping through the lurid pages of the magazine. Virgil was clearly not a leg man.

Nick snorted. "/How/ did you do that? You count Uno cards or something?"

"You're lookin' at a man of many hidden talents." Ellis put down his magazine and grinned. "Thought you'd enjoy gettin' under Coach's skin a little bit after all'a that checkers shit." Nick fucking sucked at checkers. Coach was an awesome old guy, but it was only fair that Nick get his turn. He'd been totally helpless against Coach's encyclopedic knowledge of ancient "yo mama" snaps. Anyway, Ellis liked the way Nick chuckled and smiled all sneaky when he beat the old man at something. It was a rare sight.

"It's a shame they don't play Uno back on those Geo'gia riverboats. You'd be a wealthy man." Nick stretched out on his side of the bed. "I'm taking a nap, I guess. Being on a boat's like being in prison, except you can't smoke. All there is to do is sleep and kill time."

Ellis' lip twitched. "Helluva lot safer to drop the soap, though."

Nick snorted again. "Well, there is that. Not that there's much room to drop the soap. I can't believe Coach even fits in that plastic tube they call a shower." He groaned and put a hand over his face. "I can't believe I just put that image in my head."

"Aw, hell, man, why'd you gotta do that?" Ellis laughed and whacked him with the magazine. "I was home free 'til you said it."

"I shouldn't have to suffer alone."

"Tch. Right after I bagged all them games for you, too. That shit's just ungracious."

Nick just snickered and closed his eyes. Despite ample opportunities to shave these past couple of days, a shade of stubble still dotted his chin and jaw, confirming Ellis' suspicions that Nick kept it there on purpose. Not that it bothered him any; he liked the stubble. It made Nick look like a badass. Which was sometimes appropriate, but not half as often as Nick liked to think, even if he usually looked like someone was wiping his ass with sandpaper.

Still, he was a handsome man, in a cranky pool shark kind of way. His forehead was big enough to sell ad space on, but he had nice green eyes and Ellis liked the way the hair on the back of his head got a little curly when it rained.

Nick cracked one eye open and looked at Ellis looking at him. "The hell you plotting, kid?"

"Just enjoyin' the sights while I can. I'm probably gonna be the only person who ever sees you takin' a nap in a Hard Rock T-shirt n' shorts."

"The four of you are going to be the last people who ever see me in a Hard Rock T-shirt and shorts, period."

"Y'see? Where's a damn cell phone when you need one?"

"If you had a camera, you'd never make it out of here alive."

Ellis just laughed and flipped through the rest of the magazine, looking for a page with actual words on it.

--*--


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Note:** In recognition of FFN's ratings restrictions, this chapter is censored from its original version. The content that remains is no worse than you'd find in some R-rated movies which, while definitely not suitable for anyone under the age of 17, I feel still adheres to the site guidelines.

I've made no attempt to rewrite or adapt the explicit scene, I've simply removed it. When you see the insert [elevator music], you have two choices. You can either imagine the sex for yourself or, if and only if you're over the age of 18, you can visit my Dreamwidth account-- also snapcakes, the homepage listed on my profile-- and read the deleted scene. (It's posted separately for any FFN readers who visit and have already read through. It's currently on the first page, but if need be in the future, check the "deleted scene" tag.)

Plot-wise, it makes no difference if you read the deleted scene or not.

--*--

Country Fried

Chapter Three

"Aw, man, AWESOME!"

Nick woke with a start, blinking up at a dark ceiling. Ellis must have shut off the light when he left. He could hear the others chattering outside, the salt tang of heated chicken soup wafting under the door. Surely the kid wasn't getting this worked up over another dinner of canned shit and Twinkies.

Then again, that was entirely possible. Probably nothing worth investigating. He was just about to roll over and go back to sleep when the door flew open and Ellis bounded in, cutting a ridiculous silhouette in a billowing T-shirt that loudly welcomed the viewer to Miami in curling purple Spanish.

"Dinnertime, Nick!" he bellowed, reaching down to help Nick to his feet. "It's soup n' crackers tonight, hope you don't mind eatin' little stars for noodles. I'll eat 'em if you don't. Chicken and stars is the shit! But I went and made you a plate already." So it was the soup, after all. He'd probably spontaneously combust over a box of Lucky Charms. "An' guess what, Virgil told Ro there was a DVD player up in the cabinet there so we can watch TV sorta! I mean, it's old TV an' all, but it's still sorta TV!"

Nick sat down on the living/dining room floor and accepted the paper plate Ellis handed him. The crackers were spread out in a little fan around the bowl. Weird kid. It was kind of sweet the way they were carefully overlapped at the corners, though. "Thanks. Just what kind of 'sorta TV' are we watching?"

Rochelle held up a couple of boxed sets. "Coach is eating upstairs with our captain, so we have our pick. Between 'Charles in Charge' or season 3 of 'The Facts of Life,' so… I guess we can pretend we're watching Nick at Nite. Like, ten years ago." She put the boxes down with an eloquent shrug.

"Seriously? This is how Virgil spends his downtime?" Nick grimaced at the garish DVD covers. "I fucking hate Scott Baio."

"'The Facts of Life' it is, then." Rochelle flipped open a grey plastic box on the bench seat, revealing a glowing blue screen. "You probably remember this from high school, Nick." She dropped a DVD into the player and hit play.

Nick swallowed a mouthful of soup. "Har dee fucking har. I'll have you know this shit came on when I was in kindergarten or something."

"Is that what they called college in the '60s?" Ellis looked deeply pleased with himself. Rochelle choked on a cracker.

"Ha. Ha. The hillbilly's got a mouth on him."

"Be nice and eat your soup."

Uno, bad sitcoms, and sodium-enriched chicken soup. Christ, it was like being six years old again. Ellis was in good company for once. Nick methodically dipped and ate his crackers, trying to let the cacophony of stilted dialogue and laugh tracks fill his head with white noise.

The networks had gone to test patterns weeks ago, then to static, then to dead black as patches of the grid went down across the South. How long would it be before the satellites started falling from the sky? There was no way of knowing what had survived beyond the continental states. They'd caught a glimpse of an outbreak map back at the hotel. Even then, so soon, most of the region had been overrun.

He'd been alone when the shit hit the fan. He hadn't seen anyone turn; he'd just heard a few vague stories on the news, tuning out the travel advisories, and then a cleaning lady had tried to eat his face. Post-2001 restrictions may have saved a few pilots flying overseas, locked tight in their cockpits, but what happened when the steel trap of zombies opened on foreign soil? Probably the same goddamned thing that had happened here. One bite, two bites, three bites, Armageddon.

It seemed increasingly likely that the world was dead. Tiny hunks of freeze-dried chicken and noodle swirled about the bottom of his bowl like tea leaves, and the fortune they told was grim. They'd have to leave the boat and find the last evac point, possibly the last left standing in the western hemisphere, with no guarantee there was anywhere left to go. The crows were probably already circling.

Shit, he was getting morbid. Consider life. But even if they lived long enough to make it off the mainland, what then? It was unlikely he'd be able to jet off wherever the fuck he felt like once they made it to a safe zone. In the past, he'd had some notions of settling down eventually, getting a permanent address, finding some reasonably legal way to buoy his savings while he lived out his years as one of the aging bachelor queens that had kept him in clothes, cars, and chips when he was younger. He'd even made a little show of permanence early on, fresh off probation, during those disastrous six months with Katie. But all of that had been his idea, done on his own terms. Not having a choice was a dire prospect.

He didn't want to die, though. He was certain of that. He'd fought too long and hard to survive, with cunning and guns as the occasion required. Whatever they were heading for, he'd keep fighting to get there, hoping against hope that they'd make it far enough for him to become a discontented survivor with PTSD issues.

The fat girl delivered a weak punchline. Ellis guffawed and slapped his knee, the only man on Earth who could enjoy a themed game of Whack A Mole with a Boomer belching rage half a mile away, the only person alive who still laughed at The motherfucking Facts of Life. A doughy little star was clinging to his chin now, supported by broth and the barely-visible scaffolding of late evening stubble. Nick fought down a sudden, crazy impulse to lick it off.

Ellis positively fucking glowed with optimism and peace. It had nearly driven Nick insane during their kamikaze sprint through Whispering Oaks, surrounded by all those dead totems of childlike joy. Nick knew that those rides and games had been run by drunks and grifters and downtrodden teenage souls, but Ellis only had eyes for the memories of glittery paint and speed. Rochelle had given the boy some credit for his spirit, but Nick had always loathed that brand of happy-go-lucky bullshit.

And yet he'd simultaneously developed a deep and abiding need to protect it in Ellis. The warring forces had driven him to distraction more than once, and just as often he'd wanted to grind Elllis' face into the dirt just to make him shut the fuck up and let Nick focus on himself.

He'd never followed through, of course. The drive to preserve that glow had won out, battered and bloody as it was from the fight, and it usually manifested itself as a grinding resentment whenever the kid got himself into trouble, like he had /asked/ to be pounced or swarmed or whatever the case may be.

If Ellis had remained a functionally retarded hayseed jock, Nick could have taken all of this and more in stride. Taken him on as a little brother figure—presumably Mom had been drinking during the first trimester—and given him the occasional pat on the head before sending him off to play. Rochelle would've loved that. They could've been best girlfriends or some shit.

But Ellis had to spoil the effect, every now and then slipping a comment or startlingly multisyllabic word into conversation that gave him away. And then there were the fucking ridiculous fish stories he concocted about Keith or an unnamed "guy he knew," which put Nick in mind of those redneck comedians who spent an hour pandering to their jug-thumping audiences before switching off the lights and their stage accents, cannily raking in the cash and laughing their asses off. Only Ellis seemed to play both roles as genuine, not so much a wiseass in a candy-coated shell as equal parts affable numbskull and winking imp.

Nick couldn't help but be drawn to the duality. He gravitated towards that glow like a particularly stupid moth fluttering around a painting of a porch light. Everything he'd successfully ignored since their meeting came into sharp focus when he felt the tug—the broad musculature of Ellis' shoulders, fleeting glimpses of well-built legs underneath baggy overalls, blue eyes framed by long, thick eyelashes, and above all, that fucking /mouth/, which Nick liked to think of as simian during his mental cold showers.

Under normal circumstances, he'd have already fucked him and moved on—it wasn't hard to bag a straight kid his age if you tried, just flash a little cash and get them curious enough for a one-off experiment—but these were far from normal circumstances. Business as usual might not even work on Junior.

Ellis turned to him, open-faced and noodle-starred, obviously ready to give Nick a quick poke in the ribs and repeat the latest asinine punchline, but something in Nick's face stopped him short. Whatever it was he saw, he didn't look the least bit confused or put off. He looked like he'd found a quarter on the sidewalk. Not like a normal person finding a quarter on the sidewalk, of course, but like /Ellis/ finding one— a shiny piece of silver-plated legal tender to serve as proof that God and all the angels wished him well. The Tao of Ellis was certainly complex in its simplicity. What the fuck he was grinning at, though, Nick had no idea.

"How's your soup, Nick?" That fucking noodle was stuck right on the cleft of his chin, like the dot on an exclamation point. Or a tramp stamp on a doll's hairy ass.

"It's soup. You got a little something right there." Nick reached out and finally, gratefully wiped the offending star off of Ellis' chin, who grinned a little wider.

"Thanks, man." Ellis turned back to the DVD player. "Hey, if the four of them was the four of us, who do y'all think'd be who? Nick's the one with the ponytail n' the smart mouth, I bet. 'Cept he's also kinda the blonde with the big hair, on account of all the fancy clothes."

"I dunno," said Rochelle. "But the first person to call me 'Tootie' gets pistol whipped, I can tell you that much." She added, "Nick."

"Ah, see, that's not fair. You can't throw me a line like that with a gun in arm's reach. Also, Coach is the fat one."

By the time the cast received their third set of Unsettling News, the three survivors had been through a twenty minute debate, followed by a close scrutiny of every scene to find evidence to support their individual claims. They'd even restarted the disc for a better analysis. Rochelle and Nick were in firm agreement that Ellis was Tootie. Ellis was less than pleased; he'd wanted to be Natalie.

"Why do you /want/ to be the fat one?"

"She's funny! An' I bet she could take all them girls in a fight. Also I'm the nice one." The others agreed on the last point, but would not be moved from their character assessment.

Rochelle, it was decided, was Blair.

"Those are fashion victim boots if I've ever seen a pair."

"Shut up, Nick." She'd wanted to be Jo, but couldn't argue against Nick's place as the bitchy-gruff one. No one argued against Coach as Natalie, because "that shit's just funny."

"He'd love that, I'm sure."

"Hell, I'm sure he'd connect with her on a deep emotional level. Over cupcakes. They'd make a lovely couple."

"She's, like, 15 or something."

"Yeah, in 1980-thefuck. Present day, she could collect Beanie Babies and binge on pre-packaged pastries, he could make the cheeseburgers."

Coach's footsteps on the stairs halted all conversation immediately. Rochelle quickly excused herself, ruffling Ellis' hair on the way out. Coach tossed a couple of plastic bowls into the sink and dropped his bulk onto the bench seat.

"Y'all been watchin' that little TV thing? All I remember about any of that shit is Tootie after she got grown up. Kim Fields, she was hot." He looked at the DVD box with a general lack of interest.

"Well, well, Ellis. Coach had a thing for Tootie. You think—"

"Shut up, Nick." He actually looked uncomfortable, and the whole night was suddenly worthwhile.

--*--

Ellis insisted on watching the rest of the first disc after Coach kicked them out of the living room. The player had a backup battery, so he'd smuggled it into the room with them and set up a miniature home theater on the bed. Nick had taken the path of least resistance and sat next to him against the far wall, occasionally commenting on the blonde girl's questionable wardrobe choices, but mostly just pointing out scenes that underlined Ellis' soul bond with Tootie. Ellis made some lame stabs at giving him shit in return, to little effect.

"I like the brunette," Nick said in response to one such attempt. "I respect anyone who calls bullshit when the need arises." Ellis threw an arm around his shoulders. It was a comfortable gesture, despite Nick's earlier noodle-related impulses.

"Now, see, I'da thought you liked the bullshitters better."

"Bullshit does have its place. But I could go either way."

"You sure you don't just wanna hit that? Maybe she's your type." Oh, haha. Nick tried to shrug off the arm around his shoulders, but Ellis wouldn't budge.

"Buddy, you don't know the first thing about my type."

"Wanna bet? I'm pretty good at this kinda shit. She's /my/ type, anyway."

"Dark hair? Blunt, cranky, underage? Knows her way around an engine?"

"Blunt n' cranky, sure. And the dark hair. The motorcycle shit's a bonus. I like 'em a little older, though."

"Sixteen or seventeen?"

"Older'n that, thank you very much. /I/ am a motherfuckin' gentleman an' I don't appreciate you insinuatin' what you sound like you're insinuatin'."

"Seventeen and a half, then."

"Asshole." Ellis gave Nick's shoulders a fraternal squeeze. "Naw, I value experience, y'know? Gotta make sure they know their way around. Mid-30s n' such."

"Cradle robbers, then."

"Fuck yes! 'Specially if they can afford $3000 suits n' know how t' shave just so it looks like they never shave." Nick suffered a brief mental flash of stubbly female legs slipping out of a pantsuit before he caught Ellis' meaning.

"Very funny, Overalls." He was going to have words with Rochelle. Very strong words.

"What's funny? They do that shit on TV all the time, so other people've gotta like it, too. Course sometimes it'll give you a /nasty/ case of rugburn for your troubles."

"I'm sure this is the voice of experience talking." This evening was taking a decided turn for the bizarre.

"Well. Not /too/ much experience."

Nick's retort was cut off when Ellis suddenly, inexplicably kissed him. His mouth held the same combination of chicken soup and rotgut wine on Nick's own breath. A mad chorus of "what the fuck" banged around in his head as he froze, stunned into a living statue. He waited for Rochelle to burst through the door with a camera, cackling over a dare made good. But then, that seemed a little harsh for Ellis. Maybe this was a sexually confused game he picked up at summer camp, bunking with a highly experimental roommate.

All of this whipped through Nick's head in less than two seconds. Maybe three or four or ten. Whatever. Long enough for him to react, and when he didn't, Ellis moved to straddle his lap, kissing him again. Nick snapped back to reality and pulled away. This shit was officially crossing the line.

"Whoa, Ellis, what the fuck, this isn't, what the fuck? I mean, ok, yeah, but what, ok, joke's gone too far, man." Nick held up his hands like he was being mugged, trying not to make any sudden moves or, god forbid, raise his voice and get one of the others running in here. He felt suddenly and irrationally stupid for having changed into Virgil's old clothes, as if the colors in the Hard Rock logo were loud enough to bring Coach barreling into the room, crazy-eyed and guns ablaze… for whatever reason. Ellis laughed while he sat there, still frozen.

"Dude, c'mon." Ellis hiked up his own borrowed shirt and patted a not-unimpressive set of abs. "Lookit this shit. You think I never got attention from guys before? I ain't stupid, I know what it looks like. And you, buddy, you got it written all over you." A slow-burning rage rerouted all of Nick's blood, formerly making a beeline south, straight to his head.

"What the fuck is this?" he hissed, the threat of thudding noise the only thing keeping him from shoving Ellis violently off his lap. "We go through Hell and back together god knows how many times and you decide you want to give me /this/ kind of shit? I may be a lot of things, but I'm not some lurking glory hole pervert, you slack-jawed redneck prick, and if you think—"

"Whoa, man, chill, ok? Relax." Ellis tumbled awkwardly off of his lap and backed away as far as he could. "We don't gotta do nothing you don't want to. I'm sorry, all right? Just chill. Damn." He actually looked disappointed. And hurt. Jesus fucking Christ. The world had officially gone insane. Zombie hordes, and now this. It was too much to process. "I just… thought you wanted to." Ellis' voice trailed off as he fidgeted with his collar. Fuck, he even looked pitiful now, folding up into himself in the corner of the oversized bed like Rochelle in a saferoom. Shit. Either Ellis was a better actor than Nick had credited him for, and was therefore an asshole, or Nick had just been subjected to the clumsiest, most confused seduction of his life, and was therefore an asshole himself.

An uncomfortable silence stretched out between them as Nick tried to get his head in order. He rubbed his face a few times, half-hoping it would wake him from this twisted, failed wet dream. He took a deep breath, deciding to give Ellis the benefit of the doubt. "Look, kid, I… well, I honestly don't fucking know. I'm sorry? I thought you were just fucking with me."

Ellis muttered something that could have been, "I was /trying/ to," which under the circumstances was probably meant to be a joke. An incredibly lame joke, the kind you'd get from someone who genuinely enjoyed an '80s sitcom about five shrill bitches that never left their dorm. A very, very different kind of joke than what Nick had assumed. With very, very different implications. He still wasn't having any luck sorting his head out, but he couldn't take the wounded puppy look indefinitely. He put a hand on Ellis' knee in what he hoped was a neutral gesture.

"Christ, Ellis, you're a gun-loving Catholic-or-something mechanic from /Georgia/. I'm sorry for calling you a…" He couldn't remember his exact words anymore.

"A slack-jawed redneck prick," Ellis offered, staring at Nick's hand on his knee with an accusatory expression. Nick sighed inwardly. This was the stuff of bad gay fiction.

"That. I'm sorry for calling you a slack-jawed redneck prick. Your jaw is not slack and you're not a prick. But seriously, you couldn't really have expected me to take you, er… seriously. Anyway, you're just a kid, we're all under a lot of stress, we've spent a lot of time together, I'm sure you're confused…" Dear fucking god, when had he turned into an after school special?

Ellis' head snapped up. "The fuck? An' just how old are you, Mr. Riverboat? 'Just a kid.' I'm twenty-fuckin'-three, thank you very goddamn much. Ooh, I bet you're old enough to be my big brother!" Ellis waggled his fingers when he said "ooh," so endearingly stupid-looking that Nick started to feel actual guilt. "What, you think we ain't got queers in Savannah?" This would be the worst possible time to make a Deliverance joke. A really awful time. "Or you think we just save the sodomy for our KKK goddamn cocktail parties? Which comes first, the Savannah or the cars? 'Cause I guaran-damn-tee there're more dudes th'n you know who can fix a carburetor and take a cock." He hadn't heard that. "An' you know what? 'Hell and back together,' right? Well, fuck you! How many goddamn times have I pulled your prickly ass outta one of them slimy tongue ropes or given you my last medkit or capped some big bastard zombie comin' for your guts? More times than a slack-jawed redneck prick could count, I fuckin' bet. But I guess that shit ain't enough to win the good faith of a carpetbaggin' New York sleazeball come to swindle the simple fuckin' townsfolk n' tourists with his Norelco five o' clock shadow and faggot-ass white suit!" His speech concluded, Ellis fell into a most epic sulk, fixedly staring at the space over Nick's head.

An absurdly well-timed laugh track rattled out of the DVD player. Nick pursed his lips and tightened his grip on Ellis' knee. He felt his shoulders shaking. Somewhere in the roil of emotion deep in his gut—mostly guilt, annoyance, and poorly-timed arousal—he felt something else rising, pushing everything else aside, threatening to take over. It surged inside him; he bit his tongue to hold it back, but the force was unstoppable. He coughed once, trying to cover it, before the force overwhelmed him and he was on his back.

Laughing his ass off. It was actually kind of hard to breathe.

"Hooooleeeeee sheeit, Ellis," he managed, choke-laughing and wiping the tears from his eyes. "That… … that was fucking… I don't even know! Impressive? Jesus Christ. First of all, I'm from New Jersey." Ellis snorted. "Look…" He was about to say something else, maybe apologize again or defend the honor of his suit, when he felt Ellis' weight settle back on top of him. Ellis wedged his thigh between Nick's legs and propped himself up on his elbows, hovering close. He rocked hard against Nick's hips. Once to introduce himself, and again to stop Nick's laughing.

"Admit it," he said, dead serious. "You wanted to. You want to." He kept rocking, a little more gently but no less insistent. "Admit it." Nick cleared his throat.

"Stop it, Ellis. You've made your point. Whatever the fuck it was."

"Unless I'm mistaken, the point is still in progress," Ellis drawled, not breaking his slow rhythm.

Boner puns? Seriously?

"I'm not the dumbass you think I am, y'know. And you ain't foolin' nobody, Mr. Riverboat. 'Cept maybe Coach. Ro's been givin' you shit for wantin' on me from day one. I'm helluva lot better at keepin' my thoughts to myself than you are. I reckon that pro'bly means I'm smarter than you." Nick tried to look away. It wouldn't do to associate that shit eating grin with what Ellis was doing.

*/I am in the fucking Twilight Zone. Observe: The dead rise, and a young jackass from Savannah dry humps an unwitting homosexual from the Northeast./*

"First you insult my suit, now my intelligence. I don't know who taught you to be a sexual predator, but…" He stopped short again as Ellis' face moved closer to his own, their lips almost brushing.

"I take it back. I like your faggot-ass white suit," Ellis murmured, still grinning. The full length of his body was pressed against Nick's longer frame. "And don't bother goin' all Chris Hansen on me. I'll stop just's soon as you say it n' mean it." He looked pointedly in the direction of their joined hips. Holy fucking Christ, he was serious.

"Ellis," Nick said with a lot more resolve than he felt, "I don't know where the fuck this is coming from, but this kind of thing creates complications. It's complicated. We have a ways to go yet, we /need/ to stick together, and the last thing we need is a… complication." Ellis' efforts were apparently turning Nick into a blathering idiot. One of his hands had found Ellis' hip and was threatening to roam further, all of its own accord.

"Bullshit." Ellis could really enunciate when he was making a point. He popped back up on one elbow and made a face at Nick in the half-light. "It's the least complicated thing in this whole fuckin' mess. Shit, Nick, everything goin' on out there, it's a goddamn apocalypse. All we got left are the clothes on our backs and whatever we find layin' around and ourselves and a coupla people we ain't never met before in our lives, helpin' us survive." Nick was almost positive that Ellis was making an enormous amount of sense under all that Georgia, but damned if he could tell how persuasive he was /actually/ being with the steady dry humping and rapidly growing erection so close to his own. Every carefully repressed thought and impulse he'd had in the past eternity rushed back on him now, blinding better judgment. The kid might be a clumsy ass when it came to seduction, but what he lacked in style he more than made up for in persistence. "But here we got a private room with a closed door, a big-enough bed, and you want it and I want it. Doesn't sound all that complicated t' me." Something was incredibly persuasive here.

This was such an utterly stupid idea. Of all the dumbfuck, shortsighted things Ellis could possibly have come up with, this was the most idiotic. It was just a matter of time before he snapped out of it and made every subsequent moment in each other's presence an exercise in awkward agony. Which is just the kind of chemistry a survival team needs, of course. But then—and this was very difficult to ignore—there was a hot, hard body grinding him into oblivion in the furtive dark.

In the end, it was the mouth that did him in. All Ellis had to do was stop grinning and wet his lips.

"Christ." Nick reached out and snapped the portable player shut. He wasn't about to do anything else with Mrs. Garrett watching. With the display closed, the room fell to full dark. Ellis had given up talking himself, only grunting a little during the fight to pull ten cotton yards of Bienvenidos a Miami over his head. Then he leaned down to kiss Nick again, and this time no one froze.

[elevator music]

As the sweat on their skin cooled to a chill in the refrigerated air, Nick rose out of a light doze to wonder—all over again, god damn it—just what the fuck he was supposed to do now. Neither of them had the option of getting up and leaving; they were both going to be sharing the bed for a while yet. Just how that was meant to go was up to Ellis, it seemed. The thought was more than a little irritating. Anyway, it was totally irrational for him to be thinking this way in the first place. They'd both wanted to get laid and they had, he had just as much—

"Lift your head up." Nick obeyed without thinking. A soft camp pillow slid underneath his head just before the patched quilt they'd been provided was pulled up to his neck. Ellis settled down beside him under the quilt and put an arm across his chest, as casually as if they were sitting together in a safe room, eating beef jerky. Well. No use in putting up a fight at this point. As had been pointed out to him, it was a goddamn apocalypse out there. Nick slid an arm under Ellis' neck, allowing him to lay close against his shoulder.

"You weren't kidding," Nick remembered aloud, catching his breath. "You've definitely done this before. What you did there, that takes practice. … A lot of it." Ellis laughed silently. Nick could feel the little huffs of breath on his bare skin.

"You'da known that if y'all ever let me finish one of my stories," Ellis said. His grin was nearly audible in the dark. Nick raised his eyebrows invisibly.

"You and Keith? I didn't think double burn victims covered in lawnmower wounds were included in your type."

"/Drowned/ double burn victims covered in mower blade wounds. And some other shit I can't remember. But naw, Keith is a fine upstandin' het'-ro-sexual." The accent came on thick whenever he was being cute. He dropped his voice to a stage whisper. "If you wanna know the truth, only 'bout half what's in them Keith stories is true. Don't tell nobody." Nick laughed out loud.

"I'm stunned. So, what, he's not a double-roasted medical marvel? Covered in mower sport wounds and bombed by the army."

"Naw, all that's true. He just never went to the Tunnel of Love or called the patent office. But there was a goat."

"You're a jackass." He ruffled Ellis' hair with an affection he hadn't seen coming. It was just /there/, sprung fully formed from the soil of older, overcomplicated emotion. Ellis kissed him.

*/Oh, so this is what we're doing now? Excellent. Post-coital kissing and cuddling, ain't y'all cute. There's no way that'll backfire./*

*/Shut up./*

*/No, no, this is fantastic. Let's just put a down payment on a house now. One with a yard for the kids to play in and an electrified white picket fence to keep the zombies out. Won't he look cute in a frilly apron? Dinner's at six, girls./*

*/Shut. the fuck. up./*

Even as Nick tried to quash his inner voices, suddenly resenting all of his old habits for trying to disrupt his moment of peace and feeling like an asshole besides, he realized he'd already kissed Ellis back. He'd kissed him and pulled him closer, and now Ellis was draped over him like a drowsy cat. While his brain had been trying to talk over itself, the rest of him had moved automatically, against every conscious instinct, and they were falling asleep in each other's arms.

Son of a bitch.

Now was not the time to relax. Now was not the time to get wrapped up in the all-male version of a melodramatic wartime romance. Those movies fucking sucked, anyway.

Boundaries had to be established. The situation had to be controlled. If they were ever going to do this again, Nick was going to have to get a fucking grip, ignore the grasping, needy impulses of his shellshocked brain, and keep shit as simple as possible.

But Ellis was already comfortably asleep, breathing softly against his chest. Control would have to wait until tomorrow.

There was an excellent chance that this would all blow up in his face, but he didn't seem to have much choice in the matter. He could've told Ellis to fuck off and he would have, right away, and they both knew it. Instead, he'd let himself pretend to be confused and scandalized while Ellis talked him into doing what he'd wanted to do all along.

Nick was used to shit like this coming at him out of left field. It came with the territory, living the life he did. He had the willpower of a fucking monk at his disposal if he needed it, but everything about this stupid little bastard dismantled his common sense and turned him into a horny teenager.

He had no choice but to be an idiot himself. It was a gamble he'd just have to take.

*/Oh, for fuck's sake, let's not turn this into some trite bullshit metaphor./*

Nick closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep.

--*--


	4. Chapter 4

**AN:** Here there be dragons and new material. The FFN-only posting has commenced. Thanks for all the Favorites and alerts over the past month or so. I keep the emails under a special Gmail tag to look at whenever I want to burn the fic's public chapters to the ground. Thanks again to nekocrouton for pre-reading and soothing my rampant paranoia over chapters four and five.

**PSA:** Jaej is the wise pharaoh of food, sitting atop the food pyramid and passing judgment on all the lesser foods.

--*--

Country Fried

Chapter Four

Rochelle was running out of excuses. Sometime during the first night of muffled voices and rhythmic disturbances, she'd concocted a brilliant delusion about auditory hallucinations, though she'd refused to explore the possible subconscious motivations behind them. She'd decided that a (mouth-sized) ember had landed on Nick's neck when the plantation gates exploded. She ignored the fact that it was clearly a bruise, not a burn, and that the nightly noises stopped when she blocked her ears with a blanket.

Rochelle liked to believe in a rational universe. Even zombies could be explained away somehow—just because the infection was the stuff of science fiction didn't mean it wasn't /science/. The most likely source, the most glaringly obvious explanation for the things she saw and heard, simply didn't belong in such a rational universe. But Nick's collar had slipped at breakfast, revealing a brand new, suspiciously hickey-like war wound just below the first, forever sundering reality from reason. She was out of excuses.

"So..." Rochelle ventured, pinning a pair of borrowed jeans to the line. "Think maybe we should clean your sheets, too?" Lame, but the best she could come up with.

"Got 'em right here, actually," Ellis said, patting a pile of wrinkled fabric. "I'm on my shit today. You got yours up here?"

Well, that was unproductive. "Not just yet." She racked her brains for something a little more graceful. "Mine aren't really dirty right now."

They'd been puttering along at a maddening pace for days, their progress routinely hindered by engine trouble and caution. A bloated corpse wedged in the rudder had held them up for six hours the day before. It was just the way things worked now—make a little forward progress, get fucked over by something dead. But finally, just as the cabin fever began to set in for keeps, they'd reached broad enough water to go outside. Sunlight and open air had never been more rewarding.

Virgil and Coach had insisted on taking a few hours to "catch dinner" the moment they were out of Smoker range. No one had the heart to deny them their good ole boy fun, and at least the water here was free of nauseating, semi-human flotsam and jetsam. Besides, the closer they came to the Mississippi, the closer the specter of New Orleans' probable fate hung over them all. It had taken much, much longer than expected to get this far, and the air seemed more solid and still with every mile.

Specter or no, Rochelle was less than eager to dive back into eviscerations and live bait, even if the creatures being eviscerated and baited were perfectly normal and probably edible. For the first time in her life, she chose instead to spend her free time doing laundry.

Ellis had excused himself to lend a hand because, as he claimed, his mama would be embarrassed if he didn't help with chores. Having him on board meant more laundry and less dicking around, but it did provide her an opportunity to broach an uncomfortable subject in private. If she could manage it.

A triumphant roar went up from the back of the boat. Someone had caught another fish. Rochelle glanced in the direction of the male bonding chorus.

"You think Nick is getting any?" Oh, lame. Unintentional, of course, but still so lame.

"Any fish?"

Rochelle shrugged. "Any." She added helplessly, "He's in a pretty good mood lately." Ellis stopped short and looked at her. She pretended to fuss over a giant yellow T-shirt that refused to hang properly.

"No, he ain't. He's as up an' down as ever." He laughed. "Somethin' on your mind, Ro-chelle?" He added an extra lilting drawl to her name; the knowledge behind that lilt made her distinctly uncomfortable. He looked at her with expectant interest. Rochelle hesitated in the face of such an open invitation. It really wasn't any of her business.

"Uh, well..." */Shut up, stop talking./*

She couldn't help herself. She heard herself blurt, "Are you sleeping with Nick?" and instantly felt like a horrible, horrible person. Hot, breathless humiliation clenched in her gut, as if she'd tried to casually enter a room and knocked herself out on the door frame instead. Ellis grinned.

"Well, of course. Where else'm I supposed to sleep? We ain't got more than two beds n' you're usin' the other one all by yourself. Why, you want company?"

Rochelle rolled her eyes. Ha ha, you ran into the door. She should have expected as much. "Ellis, if you..." He laughed again.

"C'mon, Ro, don't tell me a big city gal like yourself is shy about this kinda thing." He went back to pinning up laundry. He was still laughing, but his shoulders were taut, his movements deliberate and strained. Seeing him braced against her like that reminded Rochelle once again that she was a horrible, horrible person, to the point that she momentarily forgot to choke on his tacit admission of... guilt or unwholesomeness or something.

"Oh god, Ellis, no, it's not that. I don't want to impose, ok? I'm just... well, the walls are pretty thin..." Oh, Christ.

"Shit, I'm sorry." Ellis stopped laughing and looked at her with genuine concern. "I thought you just knew stuff. Like, with them psychic girl powers to know shit without nobody telling you. And stuff."

"No, no, it's not... loud," Rochelle said miserably, trying not to make eye contact. This was not a conversation to have with a little brother. She couldn't remember what the hell had possessed her to ask in the first place. "And it's not like, I... you know. I'm not like that, at all. I don't have a problem with... anything. And obviously this is the last thing in the world that matters right now. We've got enough to worry about, it's stupid to even..." The image of a cartoon scowl bracketed with stubble and frown lines screamed to the front of her mind.

Oh, yes, that was it. "Jesus Christ, Ellis, /Nick/?"

The floodgates were open. There was no going back.

"Seriously. You and Nick? Ok, yes, I'm a little surprised that you're... stop making that face. Yes, I'm a little surprised that you're into it, you know what happens when you assume—whatever. That's not the point." A stiff breeze caught the giant yellow shirt for a moment, waggling in Rochelle's direction. Ellis snorted amiably when its billowing fabric snapped up against her face. She blindly pushed it away and went on with her tirade. "I mean, it's Nick, for Christ's sake! You, you're so... you, but Nick, he's so... he's such a..." She gestured wildly with a fistful of T-shirt, her pre-hickey kitten-and-rainbows meditation completely forgotten.

"What, you don't like Nick?"

"Of course I like Nick!" It was a lie, for the moment. "I like all of you! But..."

"Aw, that's nice. What d'you like about him?"

Un-fucking-believable. He was teasing her, grinning from ear to ear. Rochelle relaxed a little, the fever from her outburst ebbing in the face of that shit-eating grin.

"Well... he, uh... he's not afraid to speak his mind... and, um... he... has really interesting... stubble," she finished lamely. Ellis nodded encouragingly, waiting for her to go on. "Well. Not just anybody could pull off the Miami Vice look. That's something to be admired. He has interesting things to say about Scott Baio. I've never heard anyone make such colorful references to Italian oatmeal, if that even exists. He has interesting taste in rings. He... has a very expressive forehead. Um..." God damn it. She was never any good at this.

Ellis was either laughing too hard to stand or had wicked stomach cramps. God, it wasn't /that/ funny. "You know..." He threw an arm around Rochelle and gave her a big, one-armed hug. "Apart from my mom, I think you're my favorite girl."

Rochelle sighed and returned the hug, drained and utterly defeated. "I'm sorry. It's none of my business. I'm acting like the nosy bitch in homeroom."

"Don't call yourself names like that. I think you earned yourself a place in my business a damn long time ago, Ro-bell."

God, he was too cute. Rochelle almost forgot her discomfort, distracted by the unfiltered charm beaming out of Ellis' every pore. He even seemed genuinely pleased that she'd asked. "Friends care about this kinda shit," he went on. "If there was anybody on this boat good enough for you, I'd wanna check up on that, too." Fine, whatever. She waved the yellow Miami T-shirt a little, a flag of surrender. Ellis didn't notice the gesture.

"Ok." They stood with their arms around one another, looking out at the water. "Is he nice to you? Because I think I could take him." If she could survive one cliché, she could survive a thousand.

"He's nice enough," Ellis said with a shrug. "Nick-nice, y'know. Anyway, it ain't like we're about to run off into the sunset together. It's just a thing. We got bigger shit to worry about." Rochelle bit her tongue. She compiled a list of all the ways she could take Nick by surprise and kick his ass, should the need arise.

"All right, then," was all she said. "For what it's worth, you're definitely my favorite guy."

"Aww, Ro. I guess we're even."

--*--

The others were still awake, but they hadn't had time to wait.

Ellis had taken a shower earlier than usual, trying to purge the eau de fried fish clinging to his hair and skin after leaning over Virgil's propane pit all evening. Some random impulse had made him slap on a little borrowed aftershave from the medicine cabinet after. Nick caught the scent the second Ellis sat next to him; he'd known he wouldn't last long. It was just some cheap dimestore shit, but anything new and vaguely attractive on Ellis drove him crazy. He'd barely noticed Rochelle's wordless eyeroll when they retired early, complaining of simultaneous fish fatigue.

It had been well worth the trouble, but going to bed early had unexpected consequences in the way of pillow talk. Nick didn't mind listening to Ellis' stories in the dark, but he was usually released from duty when Ellis fell asleep mid-sentence after two or three epic tales of mayhem. With a few extra hours between sex and sleep, Ellis had a lot more energy to spare while they recovered and recharged. Nick quickly resigned himself to learning more about hick life in Savannah than he'd ever wanted to know, particularly pertaining to Gen-Y mechanics who'd seen too many episodes of Jackass.

But the longer Ellis went on, the quieter and more intimate his stories became. He talked about his mother, he talked about the dread and anxiety of coming out to his oldest friends. In the end, he managed to get Nick talking, too. First by sparking enough curiosity to get him to ask follow-up questions, then by asking Nick questions of his own, which Nick found himself answering without a second thought. It was some seriously sneaky shit, and a serious fucking problem.

The control thing wasn't working out as well as Nick had hoped. He'd tried everything in his Standoffish Bastard repertoire to keep Ellis at arms' length, but whenever he regained some ground, Ellis would say or do something to turn him back into a blithering idiot. He was, he reminded himself, a reasonably mature adult with reasonably mature expectations for himself and his sex life. Such adults, he would add with his dourest inward glare, do not let overblown crushes turn into melodramatic bullshit after a few overnight playdates.

Still, he could hear himself talking. "Not really, I never knew them." It was close to an out-of-body experience. There was no reasoning with his mouth. It was completely detached from his brain, spilling unnecessary information all over his characteristically eager audience.

"My grandfather came out of the woodwork when I was 17, he'd been living in Greece of all fucking places, but up until then it was just a few shitty foster placements..." He probably needed a CAT scan.

"Her name was Catherine with a C, but she started spelling Katy with a K when her sister started calling her 'c-words.'" Air quotes, even. "Her sister was right. Thank god for dirty lawyers." This shit was ridiculous.

"Oh, sure, plenty. Nothing serious, though. I was never around long enough for that shit. I think my record is something like two and a half weeks." And on and on and on. Ellis told him a story about a math teacher and Nick laughed. He found himself rolled in a cocoon of sheets and limbs and, as Ellis kissed him, thinking things he knew would sound utterly retarded in the cold light of day.

--*--

They stopped playing Uno to kill time. Ellis had hidden the cards, anyway. Instead they sat around and watched old TV like they were in a nursing home, which was ok because it was kind of fun. They even watched some Charles In Charge, though naturally Nick just bitched about the main guy when it was on. Ellis thought the bitching was funny, but it got on Rochelle's nerves after a while. She declared "a moratorium on all things Scott Baio" for as long as they were on the boat and the DVDs went the way of the cards.

It had been four days. Even with that rocky start, Ellis was damn pleased with himself. He hadn't planned on Nick being such a /dense/ motherfucker, but he still knew how to get what he was after.

It hadn't been as easy for him early on. Savannah had its share of rainbow flags and shit, but it was mostly fancy stuff and he didn't know anybody in those places. Ellis had always been most comfortable in grungy little dive bars, the kind where you could show up in broke-ass work clothes with your buddies. There was a lonesome little shack like that outside the city limits, but it was always full up with married men and local political types and mint julep princesses. It bored him. Anyway, his friends didn't want to go out to the shack any more than he did, even after they'd all got used to the idea that he didn't want to date cheerleaders anymore.

So he'd learned how to spot the ones who looked at him the way Nick did. If he wasn't interested, he just played dumb and talked about church revivals and shit and they moved on. If he was, he'd make an excuse to leave—it was kind of a game, everybody knew what he was leaving for, even if it didn't happen all that often—and went out to one of his spots.

Except for this one time his buddy Keith introduced him to this guy who was new to town, a math teacher at the junior high, and they'd gotten friendly so Ellis started bringing him back to his house next to the garage. Keith had been disappointed when the teacher moved to Atlanta. He'd wanted to see Ellis settle down some, probably because he was thinking about proposing to the girl from the Applebee's and didn't want to be the only one of them tied down.

Ellis missed Keith something fierce. The math teacher, not so much. That dude'd been so deep in the closet he was finding Christmas presents. Ellis respected a man's need for privacy, but only buying condoms on the internet and ducking into the next aisle when they saw each other at the Walmart seemed a little more private than the situation called for.

Sometimes Nick was a cross between the math teacher and the bar drifters, sometimes not. Sometimes he was a stubbly teddy bear, cracking jokes and making up dumb nicknames. Sometimes he got that sandpaper-wiped look back on his face and acted like somebody was holding a gun to his head to make sure he kept on being an asshole.

Ellis just shrugged and kept to himself when Nick got to being all dickheaded, but he did kind of wish there was some visible sign as to when it was gonna start. Like, maybe Nick could wear an actual sign on his forehead that he could flip around according to his mood.

When Ellis suggested the sign idea out loud, Nick had laughed and called him Overalls—he'd laughed again when Ellis pointed out that he wasn't wearing any right then—and apologized by sucking him off in their room, so at least Ellis knew he could sometimes flip the switch himself. Sometimes.

It was just the two of them in the main room now. Coach was upstairs as usual and Rochelle had gone off to take a nap. She said boredom made her sleepy, but remembered to say that oh had she missed being bored, just in case God was listening and decided to make things more interesting. Boredom must have made Nick sleepy, too, because he'd tried to settle in on the bench seat and read some book about the Civil War, but ten minutes later his head had tipped back and he was out. It didn't look like he'd made it past the second page.

Ellis kept the DVD volume low for everybody's benefit, eating a handful of dry cereal left over from lunch. He could mostly just hear crunching and bursts from the laugh track, but he was content to watch the pictures. Some Chinese girl was in trouble with her dad and everybody was worried and shit. That was probably the whole plot right there. This was a good show.

Nick looked real uncomfortable up there, sleeping with his neck crooked. Ellis thought he should probably wake him up, but then he never got a chance to look at Nick for long in full light. The afternoon sun glowed through the high windows, totally unlike the dim glow of their bedroom or the dirty, filtered light of an early safehouse morning. It lit up every imperfect detail of Nick's face. He wasn't the best-looking guy Ellis had ever slept with, but Ellis liked the way he looked better than the others. He liked him a lot better, period, though he couldn't say why.

But he did like him, and he'd've liked Nick even if he hadn't wanted to fuck him. The dude was cool. He was funny and he was a badass, but he was the kind of badass that was nice underneath even if he didn't think so. You could tell when he was being nice that he thought he was really trying, but that it just came natural, like somebody who was naturally athletic but didn't know it because they were on a team of people who'd been playing football all their lives. Dave was like that when he joined up in high school, after his parents got divorced and his mom finally let him play, but after a while he was kicking everybody's asses every game. Also the dude weighed like 300 pounds.

Ellis wadded up the napkin and shoved it in his pocket—he didn't want to make any noise opening up the trash thing—and stood up. Nick was frowning lightly in his sleep. He'd said he didn't plan on sticking around. Once they were somewhere safe, he'd probably make good on that claim, fuck off to do Nick things and get into all kinds of Nick trouble. They didn't talk about it.

Ellis wasn't gonna hold his breath, but it'd be nice if Nick changed his mind for a while. Either way, though, he didn't see any harm in enjoying the time they had. They might even see each other again sometime after that. Not like there'd be tons of people left to hide behind.

Ellis braced himself against the wall with one hand and leaned over to look into Nick's face. He had Cheerio breath. It was kind of sweet, cereal breath coming out of a grumpy old bastard like that. Ellis kissed him.

Nick sighed groggily through his nose as he came around. Ellis was still kissing him, soft and almost chastely, with short, closed-mouthed touches. Nick lifted his head from his shoulder to respond, his hand sliding into the hair at the nape of Ellis' neck, winding into the landscape usually smothered by a baseball cap. He didn't open his eyes, just parted Ellis' lips with his tongue and deepened the kiss. They stayed that way for a long time, Ellis braced against the creaking movements of the boat and Nick holding his face close. It was, Ellis realized, the most perfect, quiet moment he'd had for as long as he could remember. For the time being, they were together, they were as happy as circumstance allowed, and that was enough. Then Nick jerked away like someone woke him up with a bee sting.

He almost looked like he'd been dreaming about something or someone else and woke up to find Ellis instead.

What a prick. */Well, there goes that./*

"Jesus Christ," Nick said, closing the book in his lap and straightening his clothes. "What the hell, kid?"

"What the hell, what?" There was that look again. "The fuck got up your ass?"

Ellis was a hard man to piss off. He was slow to anger, irritate, annoy, chafe, chap, or rile. But these motherfucking /looks/ set a slow burn to his nerves that he couldn't ignore. "I didn't stain your damn suit or nothin'. You were fine two seconds ago."

"We're in the living room, for fuck's sake." He said it like his parents were in the next room.

"The fuck? It was just a kiss, Nick. It ain't like I got on my knees n' took your dick out."

Ellis wanted to want to shrug and fuck off someplace else, but he couldn't. Maybe it was the way Nick had jerked away like he was on fire. Maybe it was the way Nick's look had shattered the moment into razor-sharp shards. Maybe he was just getting sick of this shit. Whatever it was, he sort of wanted to punch the motherfucker.

"Still, the fucking living room..."

"Afraid Rochelle or Coach is gonna see you at it? Jesus fuckin' Christ, you really fuckin' think Rochelle gives a fuck? And what the fuck is Coach gonna do, toss us overboard n' try to get by with two guns instead of four?" Ellis paused. "Or d'you just not wanna get caught suckin' on the redneck mechanic's face?"

"Ellis, don't start shit like that."

"Shit like what?!"

Nick gestured for him to lower his voice or calm down or both, which only served to piss Ellis off even more. Nick was a talented man. "Look, kid, that's not what I meant. But shit like that... we can't pretend this is something it's not. I told you, we don't need any complicat—"

"WHAT are these goddamn motherfucking bullshit COMPLICATIONS you won't shut the fuck up about?!" Ellis exploded. He ignored the hissed warning that Rochelle was trying to sleep next door. "I don't know if you've been payin' attention, but /I/ am the least goddamn complicated person you're ever gonna meet. YOU, man, you're the fuckin' complication here. Seems t' me things'd be fine if you'd stop being such a pain-in-the-ass prickly sonofabitch."

Nick rubbed his eyes. He had his Long-Suffering Look on, the one he got whenever he started to feel like a babysitter or some shit. Like Ellis was throwing a goddamn tantrum. It was getting harder not to hit him.

Ellis opened the trash cabinet and threw his napkin inside. "Never-fucking-mind." He slammed the cabinet shut. "This shit with you's a waste of goddamn time."

"Ellis." Nick almost sounded offended, which was fucking hilarious under the circumstances. Before Ellis could tell him so, Rochelle's door opened.

"You two stop. Coach is coming. I heard the footsteps." She seemed a little embarrassed to be interrupting, but more annoyed that she was embarrassed at all. She glared poison-tipped daggers at Nick and it warmed Ellis' heart all over for her. The walls were thin enough; she must've heard everything.

Coach's stomping on the stairs kept them quiet. He opened the door and surveyed the silent scene waiting for him, still as a diorama. Nick in particular looked like a kid caught pissing in the front lawn. Coach shook his head. He obviously didn't want to know.

"We got some new plans, y'all. All this rescuin's the boat's been doin' is hard work and we're lookin' at a fuel problem. There's a town aboutta half hour from us with a gas station near the shore." Ellis' blood was cooling off, but he liked the sound of a quick trip to shoot some bitches and grab supplies. "Seein' as we're the ones bein' saved here and none of us can drive a boat besides, it's only right we get the gas ourselves. Headin' out in 30 minutes, y'all be ready." He nodded vaguely in conclusion and disappeared back up the stairs, giving them time to wrap up whatever bullshit they'd gotten themselves into.

"Well, that's just fantastic," Nick started in.

"Shut the fuck up," Ellis said, not looking at him. "No gas, no boat, we die. Simple as that." Rochelle looked kind of proud of him. "All right, half hour n' we get to bust some heads! Where's my hat?"

He didn't look at Nick as he scooped his shoes and hat out of the bedroom. He ignored Nick's eyes on him while he tied his shoelaces and threw some flare guns and their heavier weapons into a duffel bag. He said nothing at all to anyone as he dropped the bag next to Nick and pounded up the stairs after Coach. He pretended he didn't hear when Nick said his name.

He could still see that scandalized, son of a whore look on Nick's face. The moment Nick jerked away played over and over in his head, boiling his blood fresh every time.

Well, Nick wanted uncomplicated. Nothing less complicated than plain being ignored.

--*--


	5. Chapter 5

**AN:** I just now changed about a dozen things in this chapter, meaning it's undoubtedly now riddled with holes, but my eyes are glazing over and I can't read any of this without silently reciting most of it from memory. Therefore, if you find any horribly embarrassing typos or whatever, please let me know. (Provided these chapters ever show up in the listing, of course.) I'm tired of picking at it.

**PSA:** Jaej doesn't sleep. She waits.

--*--

Country Fried

Chapter Five

"Who the hell died and made me gun monitor?"

"Pretty much everybody."

How precious, how uncomplicated, starting off a suicide mission with smartass remarks. Nick let it go. The skies were boiling overhead, the breeze ominously chill— even the weather knew that this was a /really fucking stupid/ idea. No doubt it would punish their folly with hypothermia and horizontal rain. But while the weather conspired against them, the gentler gods of abandoned burger joints took pity on the poor bastards.

Nick chose not to reflect on the probable fate of whoever had been here last, nor why they'd left their guns and ammunition behind. It would be slightly easier not to die with military-grade weapons instead of fire axes and crowbars, at least for a while.

The blinking traffic signs shouted at them through the Burger Tank's plate glass windows. No gas at the gas station. Fanfuckingtastic. He tried to suggest they return to the boat and wait out the storm before blasting their way further inland, but stupid proved more contagious than the zombie plague. And he couldn't leave the three of them on their own. Fucking idiot bastards.

Nick vented his frustrations on an unwary Smoker that revealed itself too soon in the street, hacking its Elephant Man head into zombie tartar and swearing violently under his breath. Coach, too far away to hear Nick's least generous remarks, looked on with approval. Ellis, still in earshot, ignored him and kept walking. The rain fell a little harder.

The trip to the next gas station was a uniquely harrowing experience. The streets were no worse than any other shabby shit neighborhood they'd passed through, but road blocks and bizarre quirks of urban planning herded them like doomed cattle straight into a labyrinthine industrial nightmare. A labyrinthine industrial nightmare packed with ultra-mutants and emaciated, sobbing whores with razor-sharp manicures. It was almost ironic that it had once been a sugar mill.

It took twice as long as it should have to get through to an exit point, serpentining around the witches and hacking the normal—hah—infected apart with whatever they could get their hands on. They couldn't risk firing a shot at one of the weeping empresses of the undead. Coach had accidentally clipped one once, back in Savannah. They'd barely had time to make it into a saferoom before the creature was at the door, clawing at the window with screaming rage until they downed her with three full clips to the face. In the morning, there had been inch-deep gouges in the painted steel.

Nick's heart stopped for what felt like a full minute when a Charger nearly took Rochelle careening right into a clutch of witches wandering blindly behind a storage tank. Always a fucking Charger. He and the other men descended on the creature with unmatched fury, severing every one of its limbs in enraged silence. With the brewing storm and constant threat of seeing one's intestines shredded to confetti, it was a day ripe for overkill. The clotted gore on their instruments was too thick for even the heaviest rain to wash away completely.

The four were rewarded for their daring adventure through New Hell with a ride down an ancient and badly rusted elevator, moving with the speed of ten mighty snails and making enough noise to attract the attention of every zombie within a five mile radius. When a Spitter loogie came within an inch of dissolving Coach's kneecap, Nick decided it would have been safer to just jump to the ground floor, shatter their goddamned legs, and /crawl/ through the wheat field. Or cane field, as he was so curtly informed by Ellis. They were still in no danger of a conciliatory burst of passion.

The presence of full, portable diesel cans at the station cooled the last of Nick's seething irritation. Someone had even installed a reinforced door inside, giving them a relatively safe space to catch their breath. The bar landed with a harsh clang that, set against the sobbing of four witches staggering around the pumps, might as well have been the Hallelujah fucking Chorus.

Nick leaned his head against the edge of a shelf, not trusting himself to sit down. They'd all survived more or less intact, but the endless cycle of adrenaline surges and crashes had flayed his nerves, leaving him limp and befuddled. As his heartbeat slowed, he felt the sting of a disinfectant wipe on his leg. He hissed reflexively.

"Suck it up and hold still," Ellis told him, not looking up. The bill of his cap blocked his face from view, but Nick could see the seeping blood on his biceps and side, obscuring much more serious wounds being neglected in favor of his own cat scratch.

Complications. Nick's throat tightened; an acid burn rose in his chest. It was either an acute case of indigestion or the burning humiliation of abruptly gained perspective. Maybe both.

"Christ, kid," was all he said. He carefully lifted away the fabric of Ellis' T-shirt, only to find it stained but intact. The overalls had been the real victim, the wound closer to Ellis' hip than the spread indicated. Fuck Kevlar; they should be using the Immortal Bull Shifters tee in the Middle East. Should have used. Whichever.

"It looks worse than it is," Ellis said, staring down at the cut to avoid eye contact. Nick cleaned the blood away and Ellis was right, it wouldn't even need stitches. Nevertheless, Nick approached the wound as if defusing a bomb. He tensed at every wince or sharp intake of breath, working with a delicacy that seemed to surprise them both. He was overreacting—if only internally—but his attention was the closest thing to an apology he could manage for the time being. Exactly what he was apologizing for was a detail he'd have to work out later.

They were going to have to cut their little affair short; that much was obvious. They'd never make it otherwise, if this was where they were after just a few days. The feelings they all had for one another had reached its maximum depth—enough to make them care, to protect each other, to work as a team with genuine, half-unselfish interest in their collective well-being. Nick and Ellis were in serious peril of breaching that depth, turning what had been an incredibly successful operation into something ugly and unworkable.

It hadn't been Ellis' fault, after all. He was just an affectionate kid, probably totally unaware of the effect his gestures had on a jaded old prick who'd already been forced to learn the dangers of unregulated human contact. Ellis would bounce back in no time, whatever happened between them. It was Nick who had to keep his guard up. A bitter asshole like himself had to be careful with mixing apocalyptic desperation with affection. Ellis was buoyant, resilient; Nick was just hardened, and could be cracked. He felt like shit.

Ellis cleared his throat. "Thanks, man." Snapping back to the present, Nick found his ministrations complete. His hand had just stayed there, resting on Ellis' side while he was lost in thought. He tried for a moment to play it off, as if he'd just been checking the soundness of the tape. Before he could move away, Ellis took that hand and gave it a light squeeze.

It was sweet, it was subtle. To anyone else, it would have looked like a handshake. Nick never would have credited Ellis with any kind of skill in nonverbal communication. He only ever shut up when his life or orgasm depended on it. But that small, gentle squeeze made him look up, and there was Ellis, clearly reading his face like a Denny's placemat, and his face in turn was just as legible.

It read: Everything you're thinking is stupid and you're stupid for thinking it, but I'm going to let it slide. Ellis let go of Nick's hand and gave him a knock on his good shoulder.

"Buck up, man. A little rain ain't gonna hurt nothin'. We're gonna be back in no time." Ellis' back was to the others. Even if he'd been standing in the middle of the room, they wouldn't have been looking at his face. They were too busy scavenging, rooting through loose ammunition and deciding if molotovs were worth their weight in this weather. Nick wondered, watching him now, if he'd ever really seen Ellis' face when he was talking like this.

No, yes, he had; he'd seen the open and bright optimism in his expression during those dumbfuck stories and the light sarcasm when he said superficially stupid shit like, "This is where you make out with your girlfriend"—shit, he hadn't picked up on that one; the little bastard must've thought he was so clever—and everything else in between. But he'd never seen this before.

It was like watching a puppet show, or a stranger possessed by the spirit of a happy-go-lucky redneck. He sounded just like he always did; it was a pitch-perfect impression. But his face was shuttered like Nick had never seen, as if he'd raised a screen on either side of himself, turned away from the others to give him a look loaded with private meaning, communicating on their own channel while distracting their companions with noise.

It was like being kissed in public. Or in an old world battlefield, during a pause between explosions. Or in the living room of a rickety old houseboat.

*/For fuck's sake./* A clap of thunder shook the walls. */Now is not the time./*

He tried to ignore the fact that this may, in fact, be the only time.

The rain was coming down like a death sentence. He could hear it screaming on the pavement. There were houses on stilts. Stilts built to protect against floods. Big ones. Zombies, witches, and floods. Now was not the time to let 35 years of work be undone by a persistent young douchebag in a trucker's cap. Not the time to have a motherfucking moment of clarity, an emotional breakthrough, or whatever the fuck his feminine side was after with all this inner monologue.

Still, he couldn't quite break eye contact when he announced to the others that they had the gas, it was time to leave this goddamn hellhole, and could they please get a fucking move on.

The storm was intense and horrible. It came in frequent, violent bursts, blinding them with impenetrable sheets of rain and too-close bursts of lightning, buffeting them with winds so strong you had to try to sink into the mud and lock your knees to stay upright. Nature was siding with the goddamn zombies again. The witches had retreated to their nighttime corners and alleyways, but the Ducatel Sugar Co. was still thick with infected, unfazed by the weather and each one as stealthy as a fucking Hunter in cloaks of dark rain.

The princess zombies were too sensitive at night, the flooding too quick and unpredictable to risk ground travel back through the mill. They had to scramble across rain-slick metal pipes and towers instead, crouching and slipping and grasping and sometimes holding on for dear life. Nick had nearly fallen to his death five times over already, and they were barely in sight of the exit.

This time, though, in spite of all the death-defying stunts and other fuckery taking place—or maybe /because/ of the ever more frequent moments of pants-shitting terror—Nick was acutely aware that Ellis was always close to him. Outwardly, nothing had changed. They were both taut as wire. Nick kept just as close an eye on him and the others as he had on the first leg of the trip. Ellis would have shot that Jockey off of him in a heartbeat even if they hadn't—what? Made up? Used a couple of first aid kits on each other? Looked at each other for a few seconds? Whatever.

But this time, he relied on that proximity like a talisman against the dark.

He wasn't thinking about it. There wasn't time. He wouldn't think about it until much, much later. He was simply as aware of it as every other thing keeping him alive—his footing, his grip on his weapon, sight, sound, the approximate distance between himself and Ellis.

The wind came up again, strengthened in the courtyard by countless miniature wind tunnels that had seconds ago been innocent windows and doorways. They had reached solid footing just in time, standing on a stamped metal platform complete with railing and solid structure on one side, instead of balancing on those god-fucking-awful pipes. Coach called out to them from the far end, warning them for the thousandth time to stay together. It was a longer burst than usual, so thick it was almost hard to breathe. Rain fell into their eyes faster than they could blink or wipe it away. They were brought to a standstill, every one of their senses turned to numb static in the deluge.

Nick reached out into space, grasping and finding nothing but rain and sodden air. A thin needle of panic stabbed his gut and lodged there, until a rain-chilled body moved close to his own. He didn't jump, didn't react; it was unmistakably Ellis. The needle dissolved and he wrapped his arm tightly around Ellis' waist, holding on as if he were made of paper instead of solid, healthy muscle, liable to be caught by the wind and carried away. Ellis kept both hands clenched around his gun, eyes to the wet wastes, but tightened their circle, moving in closer to let Nick redouble his grip.

The air cleared. They were still getting a solid pelting and the water was still rising fast, but they could see and hear and almost had feeling in their frozen limbs. Coach ambled up to take the lead, slapping Nick on the shoulder as he passed. "C'mon, man, time to get crackin'."

--*--

"We can't stay here long. We need to get back to the sign before the water gets too high. I'm not up for swimming with zombies." Rochelle cast her gun aside, its magazine fully spent. Turning away from her forgotten companion, she lovingly lifted a battered AK-47 off the table with both hands. She'd been saving the Kalashnikov for the trip back, trusting it to wait for her there. God bless gun nuts and their Russian dolls. "Come on, cupcake, time to play."

"Damn, Ro, you look like Sarah fuckin' Connor with them big guns. That is so cool."

Rochelle grinned at Ellis' gushing. They were all still riding the high of slamming that big steel door behind them. They had cheered and hollered. Nick had shouted insults through the grate as they blocked the door, flipping off a zombie as he shot it in the face with his Magnum. They were exhausted and uncomfortably hopped up on pills, but they were /alive/. The noisy outpouring of relief when they'd reached the safehouse made it amply clear how low everyone's expectations had been.

"This one's my baby," she said, patting her weapon. "It makes /me/ a badass zombie killing machine!"

"Aww, girl, you already were a badass zombie killin' machine!" If the laws of physics allowed it, Ellis would be bouncing around the house like a rubber ball. His sour mood was gone; he was a tight ball of energy, irrepressible and literally high on life. The manic gleam in his eye might have been alarming under normal circumstances.

"All right, y'all," Coach announced, coming between them. "Listen up." He never sounded more like a football coach than before one of their riskier gambits. "I got no idea what's gonna be coming when we hit that sign, but we are /not/ gonna be caught unprepared. I want y'all armed to the motherfuckin' teeth, hear me? This flood bullshit is gonna slow us down, so make sure you grab everything you can before we head out. I don't want any goddamn surprises this time."

Nick and Rochelle both cringed. That was it, the high was gone. Fate was tempted.

Rochelle had quietly hoped that the infected were only drawn to noise, that they would be able to flip the switch, light up the sign, and slog out to the pier with no more zombies than usual. It was a futile hope and she knew it, but the river felt so far away. The rain was still so heavy. And she was so goddamned tired.

The gabbling screams started as soon as Nick hit the light, right on cue. He and Ellis came hurtling back down the ladder, leaping off halfway and running to their positions inside the dining room, quickly helping each other strap the gas cans onto their backs.

Rochelle gunned down everything that moved beyond the shattered windows, but still they came, too many to pick off one by one, boiling over windowsills and through unguarded doorways. She gave her pipe bomb a savage twist and hurled it as far as she could, shooting the legs out from under stragglers arriving too late to get inside the blast radius.

The Charger was dead before it could touch her, but momentum carried it right past her even as Coach landed a fire axe between its eyes. Hot blood stinking of rotten meat and metal splashed across her face, barely missing her eyes but running in a slow drip into her nose and mouth. She spat and gagged behind the counter, lightheaded with horror and disgust.

"That was the worst—" Before she could finish, Nick cried out in the grip of a Smoker's tongue and her full attention was wrenched back to the fight.

Wave after wave after wave. The tables were slick with rain and gore and blood. Small piles of intestine littered the floor. Virgil had missed the signal; he wasn't coming. They should have waited outside. The smell in such close quarters was overwhelming, playing off the lingering taste of Charger blood on the back of her tongue. She didn't want to die in a fucking Burger Tank. They should have waited in the back. Anywhere outside.

And then a horn sounded from the river, the most beautiful instrument known to man, the sound of all that was still right with the world. Every one of them called out at once to announce that the boat was here, as if anyone could ever miss that perfect, angelic note. Coach ran forward to cover Nick and Ellis' retreat from the front line. The infected had come in too close; they were both smeared with blood and brains. Rochelle mowed down a pack coming at them from behind the restaurant and ran out ahead, clearing the way with the others on cleanup. Virgil pulled in level with the pier.

Shit, they were actually going to make it. This was going to work.

They scrambled onto the deck as one, stumbling a little as the added weight of the gas cans threw them off balance. Virgil was yelling at them to get inside. He was already starting to pull away. The sky threatened to split open again, but that was fine, they were on the boat, they were safe. They were somehow, miraculously, abso-fucking-lutely inexplicably still alive. They were already at the door, pulling the straps loose from the gas cans as they hurried, throwing them inside.

"ELLIS!" Raw, unfettered terror in Nick's voice. Rochelle's foot was on the first step. She turned just in time to see Nick hurl himself over the edge of the boat and hit the pier running. And then she heard Ellis. He was yelling something, cursing and screaming, and his voice was moving away from them fast. She finally spotted him, being dragged back towards the dead van behind the Burger Tank.

The clouds burst. Ellis and Nick both disappeared in a grey haze. The numbing roar was back, cutting off Ellis's screams and Nick's incoherent shouts.

Not here.

Not now.

She could hear herself screaming. Not here, not now.

A pair of large, heavy hands grabbed her from behind before she could catapult herself in the direction of the pier. The rain disappeared. Coach had dropped her inside. He was blocking the door, yelling things that she couldn't hear. She wouldn't hear it. Go up; tell him to go if I don't come back in 30 seconds. 30 seconds. And then he was gone, too. All of them.

Rochelle gripped both sides of the door frame for support, willing herself to see through the grey wall. She tried counting her breaths, but they were too quick and ragged to follow. He'd taken her gun. She refused to count the seconds. She couldn't remember how to start. An hour passed. A day. A year. A lifetime. 15 seconds. 20. She couldn't help it; the throbbing in her leg was keeping time. She tried to ignore it. 25.

They were dead. All of them. 28.

An enormous shadow lunged at her from the deck. "MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!"

She threw herself out of the way and hit the wall hard, strangled with relief. The door slammed shut. Coach barreled down the stairs into the living room, Ellis dangling over his shoulder. Nick shouted up to Virgil, pounding on the wall to get his attention, then ran after Coach, dragging her with him, as if they could only count themselves rescued once they were all back inside the living room, all doors closed between themselves and the watery mass grave outside.

Rochelle slammed the second door. Their lives were now defined by slamming doors. Nick was already kneeling beside the bench seat, taking off his jacket like it would make a difference, trying to make Ellis talk to him. "Is he all right?!"

"He's fine, he's just lightheaded, he's ok. Ellis? Ellis, c'mon buddy, look at me and say something. Did you break anything? Ellis, god damn it, pay attention!" It was more a plea than a command.

"Smoker had him tight," Coach told her, pulling rough towels out of a cabinet. "Lucky little man got caught up on a rearview mirror b'fore the fucker could get his hands on him. If Nick hadn't been there t' beat down all them other bitches, though, he might not've been so lucky." He handed Rochelle a towel and added in a low voice, "There was another Tank. Those two lost their weapons when we got on board. If that storm hadn't started n' he coulda seen us right, well…" He looked almost terrified; it was a jarring sight up close. It must have been close. It must have been very, /very/ close. Rochelle swore to remember to say her prayers that night. She hadn't prayed since she was a little girl.

"If he didn't have a weapon," Rochelle said, piecing together a sentence from a mental whirlwind, word by word, "how did he keep the infected off of Ellis?"

"Situation like that calls for all manner of crazy shit." Coach shook his head. "He beat 'em with his bare-goddamn-hands. Stomped in their skulls when they was down." Jesus Christ. She looked at Nick's hands. They were lacerated all over, dark bruises already forming on the knuckles.

Ellis coughed, and all eyes were on him. "That," he rasped, "fuckin' /sucked/."

Nick's laugh was close to hysterical. "'m fine, 'm fine," Ellis muttered, trying to sit up. They had to help him get his back to the wall. Coach looked back over his shoulder at Rochelle.

"You gonna make yourself sick, standin' around like that. Go n' get yourself changed into somethin' dry."

Rochelle nodded mutely. Time was resuming its normal pace. They needed to help Ellis out of his clothes; she should leave. She staggered back into her room, closing the door softly behind her. She shucked every sodden article of clothing down to her shoes into a pile by the door and scrubbed herself vigorously with the towel. The rainwater burned her skin. The blood had washed away in the downpour.

She finally noticed a neat pile of clothes folded on her bed. Virgil must have put it there after he'd anchored offshore. It was yet another set of small women's clothing, another artifact from the family he'd had and lost. She wondered if it had been anything like the way she'd almost lost her own, minutes ago, or if it had been slow and lengthy pain, watching them die one by one.

That had been way, /way/ too close. She thought about what she would have done if none of them had made it back, dressing herself in a dead woman's clothes. Looking down at the long-sleeved tee, just a little too loose around the middle, she thought of the person who should have been inside it instead, and of the moment she'd seen Ellis being dragged across the back lot, and of the lifetime she'd spent in the doorway, waiting. The dam burst. She kicked her wet clothes into a tight knot in the corner, then curled up on the bed and cried herself to sleep. She'd stopped noticing the taste of blood.

--*--


	6. Chapter 6

**First, a brief love letter:** So... it's been four months. Yes, it has. A fairly complicated four months in a number of ways—I even broke my laptop!—but still an inexcusable length of time. In spite of my shocking negligence, so many total strangers who've read this fic and enjoyed it have been kind, supportive, and encouraging in ways that I never expected. You've all been sparkling examples of the best fandom has to offer. Please know that, somewhere in Texas, a bleary-eyed girl banging on a broken computer loves you all dearly.

**Author's Notes:** Thanks to nekocrouton, terabient, and of course Jaej for prereading and providing much-needed critique/encouragement/paranoia-soothing. Half this chapter would have fallen to select + Backspace without them. Also, I've only _just now _realized that FFN deletes my linebreaks when I upload the doc files. Sorry for the clutter. Finally, the fic is still ongoing and there will indeed be more chapters.

* * *

Country Fried

Chapter Six

Nick was in Hell.

It was a quieter hell than he'd imagined for himself. As a man who'd done a few very bad things for very stupid reasons, his vision of the afterlife had always been more in line with the classics—lakes of fire, grotesque demons prodding the damned with oversized silverware—but this laminate and Naugahyde illusion served just as well.

He had no memory of dying, and the space in which he was surely doomed to spend eternity was a cruelly perfect replica of the living room on the Lagniappe, but its torments betrayed its true nature. This was Hell, and his punishment for a life of violent and/or selfish misdeeds was to sit at this table until the end of time, overwhelmed by longing and a real need to escape into the bedroom, always just out of reach, while his hands burned in a bowl of garlic-scented ice water. Satan's personalized water torture. What a prick.

The door was less than five feet away, closed against the light and noise of the living room. The room beyond was quiet, as far as he could tell. All four walls were solid: water and unidentified boat-parts on two sides, Rochelle's room on the other, Nick glowering at the door on the last. They were out on the water, safe for the moment. Nothing could get in or out of that room without his knowledge. These were facts; he didn't trust any of them.

His imagination ran wild with paranoid fantasies, most of which would have required a shift in time and space to become reality. Adrenaline and stress had flayed his nerves and fried his brain; he was exhausted, tense, boneless, wired as a gerbil on speed. He wanted to go and sit on the bed and stare down at Ellis with crazed, hypervigilant intensity until he passed out from eye strain. He needed to be there.

Coach sat adjacent to him at the table, mildly sipping a cup of Virgil's paint thinner moonshine. However intense the torment, his stern but amiable supervision kept Nick tethered to his seat like a kid in detention. "You'd best see to those hands if you plan on firin' a gun again," he'd said, and fuck, he was probably right. Nick could feel them swelling, growing useless and heavier by the minute, his rings painfully tight. They weren't coming off any time soon without a hacksaw.

"I may not know much about all this first aid and what-not," Coach had added, rinsing out a beige plastic tub, "but I got enough sports injuries in my day to know a thing or two 'bout swollen joints like that. The boy's gonna be fine now, so sit your ass down. You gotta take care of your own shit for a minute."

Nick had been in plenty of fights, but always against opponents who could feel—or at least, took some scant notice of—pain. The infected weren't immune to physics. They could be knocked down, staggered by a solid punch, but they never stopped coming back for more. And whatever it was the infection did to people, it sure as shit didn't weaken their bones. His split knuckles insisted he'd spent the day knocking out wall studs with his bare hands.

The details of the fight itself were fuzzy—he remembered knocking one infected down long enough to stomp its face in; reaching Ellis, hearing his shouts—good, excellent, nothing on his windpipe; struggling to loosen the tongue, that fucking anaconda, leaving him with nothing but palmfuls of viscous slime, the angle was all wrong; two infected closing in, circling, a fist slamming into the back of his head as another grazed Ellis. Everything after that was a frenzied blur of red and gray and diseased blood arcing black through the rain. He remembered three loud cracks when the world came back into focus; the moment the Smoker's burst of noxious gas filled his throat and eyes. He hadn't been able to draw breath until they were halfway back to the boat.

So now he owed Coach everything. Which was fine, fantastic, but it meant that if Coach told him to sit the fuck down and listen to reason and take care of his own shit, he was compelled to do it. There'd be nothing on the other side of that door without Coach—and no one to glower at it, but that was beside the point—so fine, he'd ice his goddamned hands and take the pills, but he didn't have to like it.

They had stripped Ellis down and rinsed him off in the shower, Nick propping him up while Coach handled the detachable showerhead. Ellis' preternatural luck had held, leaving his neck and ribs intact and his abdomen clear of any signs of internal bleeding, but he'd hardly escaped unscathed. Livid purple marks ran in ugly rings around his chest and shoulders. The sole of a dead man's boot was stamped with eerie clarity on his thigh. A jagged cut on his left arm had taken four amateurish stitches after Nick painstakingly picked out several pieces of bottle-brown glass. All of the gauze and tape Nick had used to dress his wounds at the gas station had soaked off in the rain; the cut on his hip had become crusted with mud and grit.

Very few words were exchanged throughout the treatment. Every now and then the patient would mumble or curse, try to express thanks or embarrassment. His nurses would ignore or hush him: Coach was busy, Nick was trying not to react like a hysterical old woman. They wrapped Ellis in cold compresses and put him to bed, satisfied that he didn't have a concussion, and Nick had prepared to settle in for a long and feverish vigil. But when Ellis' eyes closed, Coach grabbed him by the arm and hauled him back out into the living room. He tried to protest, tried to explain that he had to keep watch in case /something/ happened. He babbled and Coach ignored him.

Preparing the ice bath had been kind and considerate and all that, but something full of garlic and piss had been living in Virgil's freezer since the '70s. The ice melted under the tap, leaving the water redolent of ancient leftovers and Lysol. It hung in a cloud around Nick's head, mingling with the traces of more rancid stuff that he knew would stick with him for another four or five showers. It was unpleasant but tolerable. It was nothing compared to the burning desperation of staring at that door.

Nick was far from ungrateful. He'd tried several times to offer apologetic and sincere thanks. As far as he was concerned, from that night forward, Coach could do no wrong. He was a rock star. He was Jesus. But he'd also insisted that Virgil's bathtub wine was "better than medicine," and Nick, with his hands both imprisoned in a plastic tub and too unwieldy to handle a flimsy paper cup besides, was now being forced to accept sips from a Winnie the Pooh training cup. Seeing those meaty paws hovering in front of his face as he got drunk with Christopher Robin was no less bizarre with Rock Star Jesus than it would have been with Coach Classic.

And thus was the most self-absorbed drunkard in America trapped by gratitude, desperate but unable to watch over and tend to another human being, and compelled to drink homemade liquor from whimsical Disney paraphernalia. Hell had a vicious sense of humor.

Nick coughed as a dribble of wine caught in his windpipe. "Thanks." Coach didn't cut him off this time, so he added, "For everything. You know. I don't know how—"

Coach shrugged. "Ain't nothin'. We couldn't leave y'all hangin' like that. Wouldn't be right." He stretched, popping a few stray vertebrae into place. "That was some serious shit back there, though."

"Don't I know it." Nick looked down at his hands, distorted by the water and diminishing pebbles of ice. Crazy shit. He looked up to find Coach looking in the same direction, his expression unreadable.

"You did good back there, Nicolas," he said finally. "That boy wouldn't be alive without you goin' after him when you did."

"Neither of us would be alive if you hadn't come after us. I was pretty sure we were up shit creek, myself."

"Be that as it may," Coach shrugged again, "you did a good thing. Crazy as fuck, but a good thing. You're OK."

Nick replied automatically, "I didn't have much of a choice." His own words barely registered before Coach answered with startling intensity.

"Man, there's /always/ a choice." The Pooh cup rattled from the impact of Coach's emphatic slap on the table. "Before I ran into y'all up on the roof, there was a man n' his girl with me in the lobby, lookin' to get on that CEDA chopper." He glared directly into Nick's eyes, speaking with low, rapid fury. Nick tried not to look away. "We got up t'about the sixth floor when she got a Jockey on her. That mother/fucker/," he stabbed the table with one enormous finger, "he ran right on ahead, didn't even look back. Poor girl got run right out a window before I could help." His face contorted with remembered rage and sadness. "One minute it's all 'baby' this and 'baby' that, the next he's runnin' off like a bitch. That little weasel /fuck/ was prob'ly on the helicopter that left us, too." Coach shook his head, breaking eye contact as his fury dissipated. "I don't wanna wish ill on an innocent man or nothin', but I can't help but hope that piece of shit got himself a zombie pilot, too."

Once upon a time, Nick would have sympathized with the weasel fuck, assuming he'd have done the same. Look out for number one, fuck everybody and anybody else. It was unsettling to know better. "Christ."

"Yeah." Coach sat back heavily. "It takes a real man to do what you did. For all the shit that went down, I was damn glad to see it." He looked at Nick's hands again. "That shit right there, that's real. Goddamn."

Nick blinked. Somewhere in the past thirty seconds, he'd lost the thread of the conversation. "Um." Somewhere in the stacks, far from the rattled nerves and paranoia on the surface levels, something scrambled for an appropriately dismissive line. "I don't—" Coach cut him off with a squashed, disapproving frown.

"Boy, you think I'm deaf and blind or just stupid?" The frown disappeared as quickly as it had come. He cleared the air with a backwards wave. "Ahhh, never mind, I know how y'all get. Look, I know what you're thinkin' and yeah, you'd've been right a little while ago. But now, I dunno. Shit got real, things are different. I've seen some bullshit, but nothin' beat what I saw in the hotel that day."

"I'm… sorry."

Coach wasn't really listening. He was still looking at Nick's hands. "If my wife'd lived to see this shit—and I'm glad she didn't—I'd've done anything, /anything/ to protect her. What that man did, it makes my blood run cold to think on it. What you did, though, it gives me hope. If there's still love in this fuckin' mess, I don't much care where it comes from. Nothin's the same anymore."

Nick was completely out of his depth. He knew he should be jarred by his Least Favorite Word, but it was hard to argue in the face of empirical evidence. It occurred to him for the first time that he had plunged headlong into his own death for a man he barely knew, except in the biblical sense. There wasn't much left to say. "It's only since we got on the boat, you know. I don't think—"

"No. You don't." Coach offered Nick another sip of wine. "You're a good man, Nick. Don't be a dumbass and fuck it up."

* * *

A yellow fan of light spread across the mattress, stopping just short of Ellis' face, then shrank into nothing as Nick closed the door behind himself. Flooded with the giddy relief of a man finally on parole, he reached for his top button, forgetting the bindings on his hands. It was like trying to undress with oven mitts. After a lot of yanking, squirming, wiggling, and muffled cursing, he worked his way out of his wet clothes and uselessly wiped himself down with a damp towel spared from compress duty. The warmth of the quilt laid over his moist, clammy skin and the sound of Ellis breathing blunted his frustration. He moved the pillow to the center of the bed and laid as close as possible.

"Hey," Ellis mumbled, turning his head in Nick's direction. He shifted inside his terrycloth swaddling, trying to close the narrow gap.

"Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you." Nick was afraid to touch him. Every cut and contusion was precisely mapped in his memory, but it was dark and his hands were a clumsy mess, wrapped and taped into thick claws. He found Ellis' forehead and awkwardly stroked his hair.

"I was already awake." With a thin hiss of pain, Ellis reached up and pulled Nick's hand to his chest, gingerly running his fingers over the bindings. "Shit. Your hands. I'm sorry." He was still hoarse, but considerably more alert than he'd been an hour before.

"Christ, don't apologize. It wasn't your fault. I'm just glad we got you out of there alive." Nick tried to meaningfully close his hand over Ellis' fingers, but was forced to settle for closing a meaningful lobster claw. Ellis held it close, anyway, quietly running his thumb over a ridge of tape.

"Stupid bullshit." It was only a rough scrape of a whisper. Ellis cleared his throat. "Keep that hero shit to yourself from now on, you hear me?"

"What?"

"I could see /everything/." His voice started strong and faded back to gravel; he had to stop at regular intervals to clear his throat again. "I don't know how, but I could, and that was the stupidest goddamn thing I've ever seen. Promise you're not gonna do it again."

"Jesus Christ, are you crying?"

"Fuck you, I'm not crying. Promise me."

Nick sighed and rubbed a lobster claw over his face. He had exactly two known talents in this arena: makeup sex and cruel, petty bickering. That was it. Whatever was happening now, it wasn't on his CV. "Don't be an asshole, Ellis. I couldn't leave you there."

"/You're/ an asshole." The rasp made him sound like a petulant Sesame Street character. "I'd like it better if the last thing I saw wasn't you gettin' ripped to goddamn shreds."

"That won't happen unless you land in another dead-end clusterfuck."

"/I/ didn't have a fuckin' choice. That kamikaze shit you pulled, though—"

"Yeah, well, that's out of my hands, too. Don't be a dick about it." Ellis had his hand in a deathgrip. "Ow, by the way."

"Sorry," Ellis muttered. He relaxed his grip. "You of all people oughtta know better than t' run off on a fuckin' suicide mission for /anybody/. Nobody's gonna thank you for gettin' yourself killed over a fuckbuddy." Of course he wasn't crying. Those were drops of concentrated masculinity snotting up his throat. Nick pulled his hand away and sat up.

"'Fuckbuddy,' very fucking cute. Need I remind you that /you/ were the one going on about… Whatthefuckever. Forget it."

This was so much easier when he didn't give a shit. Just tell them what they need to hear, calm them down, get laid, return to business as usual. It was an infallible formula until actual emotion entered the picture. It snuck up behind him and tore away his practiced artifice like bandages off a burn patient, leaving his core being stinging in open air: an irascible, hypersensitive, emotionally retarded fuckwit, self-centered but self-aware enough to watch the train wrecks in slow motion.

Every fiber of his being was screaming at him to backpedal as hard and as fast as he could. But he'd come this far, and there was only one option left to him: Applied Bullshit 101. He took a deep breath, meditating on his role. For added authenticity, he superimposed the sulking face of a formerly profitable fling onto Ellis' head. He felt his way around in the dark, found Ellis and kissed him.

"Ellis," he said. No response. There was a solid and terrifying chance that he'd see through the act, but Nick pressed on. He'd emerged whole from two fresh Hells in one night; he refused to fall into his own steaming pile now. "Ellis, baby. I'm sorry." Nothing.

Don't snap, don't growl, don't react.

He's someone else, convenient but unimportant and incapable of causing more than mild exasperation. He's just a pretty boy in a sulk. Smooth things over as quickly as possible and move on.

"I'm sorry," he repeated. "You know how I get. I'm really sorry. You don't deserve to deal with my shit after what you've been through. I..." Nick paused, flummoxed by an unprecedented paradox. He was trying to talk his way out of something, deliberately using the skills he'd honed to that end, yet every word was true. For the first time in his life, his bullshit had doubled back on itself and merged seamlessly with reality. "I'm sorry."

Still Ellis said nothing. Nick was out of lines, permanently derailed by accidental sincerity. He laid down and pulled the quilt back over his chest, stewing in irritated self-loathing. Less than half an hour ago, all he'd wanted out of life was to be in this room, to be with Ellis, to watch over him and take comfort in undisputable evidence of his continued existence, with flagrant disregard for what those desires implied. Once inside, it had taken him ten, maybe fifteen minutes for him to fumble a minor flare of post-traumatic melodrama and send them right back into the same brand of useless bickering he'd started before the Ducatel fiasco.

Then finally, hoarse and barely audible from Ellis' side of the bed, "Did you just call me /baby/?"

Two seconds to midnight, the phone was ringing and the governor was on the line. "… It's possible that I did, yes."

Ellis coughed his voice back to life. "That is so weird."

"Fuck off, it's not weird. It's something people say."

"It's weird comin' out of /you/."

"What, I'm not allowed to say 'baby?' Baby, baby, baby. There, I said it three—no, four times."

"Four times too many. So weird."

"No one's ever called you 'baby?' It's, like, the go-to term of endearment for besotted morons."

"'Besotted.' You're so weird."

"It's a word!"

"I keep tellin' you, I went to high school."

"And no one ever called you 'baby' in high school?"

"Girls did."

"So I'm not allowed to call you 'baby' and I can't say 'besotted.'"

"I never said you couldn't, but it's still weird."

"It is not /weird/."

Ellis made a quiet, breathy noise that could have been a laugh. "So that's what you are now? 'Besotted?'"

"What? Are you calling me gay?"

Three wet splats hit the far wall as Ellis threw off his compresses and curled into Nick. It had to hurt like hell, and the embrace introduced Nick to a previously undiscovered set of bruises on his own back and ribs. But it had to be done. Ellis' breath against his neck was the most reassuring thing he'd felt in his life.

"Never again," Ellis said.

"Not an option." His voice was muffled by the cold tangle of Ellis' hair. "It's a goddamned apocalypse out there. To paraphrase an old fuckbuddy."

"Sorry," Ellis mumbled indistinctly. Then, more clearly, "I couldn't've left you, either."

"Yeah."

"Ah, fuck. Ow." Ellis rolled away in defeat. They shuffled painfully for a few seconds, swearing and giving directions until they found a workable position in each other's arms. Once settled, Ellis groaned, "We gotta find another way to do this whole bondin' thing. The damsel in distress shit is gettin' /old/."

"No arguments there," Nick agreed. "I've got you naked and grateful, fresh off a life-threatening disaster, and neither of us can do a goddamn thing about it."

"That's just offensive right there."

"No more damsel in distress. Chargers, Smokers, fuck 'em. We're doing things the old-fashioned way from now on. Flowers and dinner and a movie."

"You bringin' me flowers or the other way 'round?"

"I don't care. We can trade off."

Ellis snorted. "So the usual."

"Exactly."

Ellis yawned widely, then grunted in pain when his bruised neck muscles protested. They were both falling asleep, struggling through every muddled quip. "You'll prob'ly hate all the movies I like, y'know."

"That's ok. We'll just make out in the back row, anyway."

"Ok." Nick kissed Ellis' shoulder, sleepy, stupid, too overwhelmed with relief and affection to be self-conscious.

This was it, then. It was complicated; it could get them both killed. But with bigger, uglier, infinitely more malicious things trying to kill them at every turn, it seemed a fair trade.

* * *

The water routes had taken too long. They were very, very late to the party.

Rochelle turned her back to the pier. A slow, horrible gurgle rolled across the water as the silent craft sank into the harbor. There was no sign of what brought the steamboat down, no cries for help as it disappeared beneath the otherwise placid surface. The familiar sounds of the infected rumbled close, just above the docks. The bridge was miles away. New Orleans was deserted. The city evacuation maps could already be outdated.

This was the endgame. No more second chances. They'd find the military evac or die trying.

As the others made their way off the boat, Rochelle laid out their supplies on a rough wooden table, assessing what they had left. It wasn't much, but with any luck, there would be a few saferooms in the city and some extra weapons and ammo around. After some deliberation, it had been agreed that they could only afford a few lightweight food items and water. There'd be no time to rest here. She was distantly aware of Nick bitching somewhere behind her. Every scabbed-over wound and newly flexible joint in his hands had brought him a little further back to his bellyaching bullshit self.

"No, really, this is fucking great. It's like being back in the mall, except bigger!"

Rochelle was on the brink of whirling around and threatening to break his goddamned hands for real this time if he didn't shut the fuck up and—

"Nick. Shut up."

And he did. Rochelle glanced back to see Coach frowning out at the sinking steamboat. Nick followed his gaze, shook his head, and cocked his gun. "/Y'all/ ready?" He gently nudged Ellis up the pier with his elbow and started for the gate in silence.

Well, then. At least they had a shot at dying in peace. She loaded a fresh clip into her Kalashnikov and sighed. Hell of a long day ahead.

* * *

"How the hell did they get infected in all that?" Nick kicked lightly at the corpse's helmet. The head waggled like a monstrous marionette, barely clinging to its neck by a loose, wet tangle of skin and tissue. "I thought you had to get bitten or something. I mean, you saw the others out there. There are shittons of infected cops. Full body armor and everything."

"We had a zombie pilot, didn't we?" Rochelle couldn't stand to look at the thing anymore. With enormous effort and eventually some help from Ellis, she shoved the riot cop's body out onto the stoop and closed the saferoom door. "It must take a lot of time for some people to turn."

"I dunno if y'all've noticed, but these things don't bite." Ellis dropped onto the staircase and wiped clotted gunk off his shoes with a paper towel. "Not one of us has ever got bit once, an' I don't think they're makin' special exceptions. This ain't like the movies."

Realizing his sudden breach of etiquette, he squinted down at the sole of his shoe and scrubbed with intense, distracted focus. Everyone else did the same, pretending to busy themselves with some minor task or other. There weren't many rules amongst them, but there was always one great, unspoken agreement: They did not talk about their immunity. It was too enormous an idea to grasp in the midst of all this death; too strange, too miraculous, unfair, terrifying.

None of them had ever uttered that one chilling word in all their time together. They'd heard it whispered, early on. Brief mentions in found documents. The odd scribble on a tabletop or wall. Rochelle hadn't understood the gag orders on the term when her crew left Cleveland, but now, standing unchanged after bathing in blood and bile, she knew firsthand how loaded it really was.

*/Carriers./*

She recalled, rather absurdly, her high school sex ed classes. Not realizing she spoke aloud, she recited, "Asymptomatic is not immune." Another breach, but the luxury of ignoring their blessing and curse was running out. The writing was literally on the wall.

/Those are carriers./

/The only good carrier is a dead carrier./

"What, you think this is some kind of zombie herpes?" It figured Nick would go straight to STDs on his own. She snorted in spite of herself.

"You tryin' to tell us you got herpes, Nick?" Ellis grinned at him, but the expression was hard and flat: They were not having this conversation. Not now, not ever.

"What the fuck? No, I don't have herpes. I'm just saying—"

"Hey, man, I need t' know if I should be hittin' a pharmacy before we leave is all. They got them pills now. I seen 'em on TV."

"I don't fucking have herpes, ok? Jesus. You think I would've—" Nick stopped short when Rochelle crossed her arms in his peripheral vision. He grimaced. "Don't be disgusting, Ellis."

"It's kinda late for me to hold it against you, 'f course. But if we need to stock up on some cold sore medicine or somethin'—"

"I do not. Have. Herpes."

Ellis held up his hands. "All right, if you say so. Just checkin'." The topic of any other infection officially shut down, he hopped off the stairs and wandered away to sort through a loose pile of ammunition. After a few beats, he said thoughtfully, "Y'all know what suck the heads means?"

Coach groaned loudly from the back of the store.

* * *

The stench was a punch to the gut, so thick it was almost gelatinous, a motherfucking Jell-O mold of death and decay. In the heavy, humid heat, Nick could feel the stink sliding over his skin, mingling with his sweat and sinking in. It was almost impossible to draw breath without gagging on all the rot and shit and piss in the air. He blinked sweat and stench-stung tears from his eyes, wasting three full clips on a bare handful of zombies grunting under the overpass. The survivors staggered forward, desperate to escape the wiggling stench, eyes fixed on a CEDA trailer waiting just beyond the corridor.

A breeze picked up outside, funneling through the exit and dulling the edges of the smell. Nick's eyes began to clear, and he looked up from the sleeve muffling his nose and mouth. The bags registered first: huge, haphazard piles of suitcases, duffel bags, purses, backpacks, stacked as high as the fence could support and clearly never intended to be reunited with their owners. A cold shudder ran up his spine at the sight of the discarded luggage, though even with a lungful of corpse stink he could see the practicality of it. However they'd been carting refugees out of the city, they couldn't possibly have had enough room for everyone's crap.

Something squished and popped under his heel. He growled in exasperated disgust and looked down to better pick his way through the ragged pile of corpses choking the exit. A pair of milky brown eyes stared back up at him, sinking into what remained of a teenage boy's face. Something was off. The body was bloated and bloodless, but his skin was still recognizably tanned. It wasn't grey or ulcerous, it wasn't—

"Jesus Christ! They're people! Actual fucking people!"

The bodies weren't infected. He should've noticed earlier. The infected smelled like rotting meat and disease and a little like ammonia, but the stench under the overpass was different: horrible, but natural. Almost clean by comparison. He'd been too busy choking on it to think twice, but there was no mistaking the difference. They had been fully human, and they had been mown down by the very people that promised them protection. Nick caught sight of a little girl in a Dora the Explorer T-shirt, still clinging to the legs of a woman without a face. He ran through the exit and doubled over, retching. What little came up pooled against his shoes.

He felt Ellis pat him on the back. "C'mon, man. We got a ways to go yet."

Nick wiped his mouth with his sleeve, smearing more filth than it removed. "Those are /people/. The bodies. They're not infected. For Christ's sake, they were still human." He straightened and ran a hand over his face. It stank like the corridor.

"I know." Ellis looked ill, but steady.

"What the fuck were they doing here? If they were shooting civilians, then—"

"We can't think about that now." Rochelle paused on the ramp into the trailer. Her eyes were distant and blank. "We have nowhere else to go."

It was true enough. Nick could feel himself falling apart at the seams, but the others were unnervingly solid. They were completely focused on that bridge, ready to find anything they could on the other side. But as far as Nick was concerned, the bodies changed everything. He'd been worried about their chances at getting out of the city, worried about their luck running out somewhere in the tight evacuation passages with nowhere left to run or hide. He'd never considered the possibility that they might die at human hands. It was so much worse, the thought of making it so far, beating the odds and finding their way back into what was left of the world, only to be slaughtered like cattle at the first signs of life.

But there was nowhere else to go.

Coach cursed from inside the trailer. "Another alarm! There's always a goddamn alarm!"

Nick forced himself to breathe at a normal pace and looked back at the lumped corpses. Ellis gripped the back of his neck, forcing him to look forward. "There's no goin' back now. C'mon," he repeated. "Long ways to go yet."

They walked up the ramp and closed the door.

* * *

"Come on, come on, it's wearing off, come on." Nick hauled Rochelle to her feet, kicking away the flattened box that had sent her skidding backwards. The fall had knocked the breath out of her, but she was running again before she was even halfway upright.

The infected were still sprinting back into the bus station, tearing each other apart over a puddle of bile and broken glass, but the pheromones were dissipating fast. Already a few stragglers had lost interest and drifted away from the pack. It wouldn't be long before they noticed their retreating quarry.

The back lot was clean, apparently cleared out by the alarm. The survivors lowered their weapons and pelted at full speed for the steel door at the far end. Rochelle gasped and coughed as her lungs refilled, slowing to a stagger as her initial burst of adrenaline wore off. Ellis turned and half-carried her into the saferoom; Nick took over to get her clear of the door. It closed with an anticlimactic thump.

Rochelle braced herself against her knees, sucking air and still coughing. Ellis hovered nervously around her, troubled by the loud whooping breaths. Coach called her "baby girl" and helped her sit down. She was trying to say something, waving her hands and pounding on her chest to force the words out. The men took her gestures to be a mimed dismissal until her hand shot out and smacked Coach on the arm. She gasped, "/Look/."

They hadn't heard the crying under Rochelle's distress. The room went cold and airless. Coach slowly straightened from his worried crouch, reaching for his weapon. Ellis froze in place, half-kneeling beside them, as Nick slowly turned his head to face the source. The fluorescent light had gone out on the opposite side of the room, leaving yet another pile of uninfected bodies in pale, gritty shadow. Just beside them, a hunched figure rocked back and forth, wracked with strange, unearthly sobs. She should have been wandering, even inside the confines of the room. They'd never seen a Witch sitting still in broad daylight.

"I'm sorry," she moaned. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't've hid, I should've stayed outside, I'm so sorry." A talking Witch.

Ellis clapped a hand over his mouth to stifle a yelp; Rochelle screamed. The Witch didn't seem to notice. She repeated her apology over and over, and her voice had the same unnatural resonance as any other of her kind. Even in the shadows, they could see her claws, twisted and chalk grey, lying helplessly across her lap. They were clean.

"Ohhh, what the fuck," Nick breathed. He and the rest stayed locked in position for over a minute, paralyzed with baffled terror. Rochelle was the first to move, pulling herself up with Ellis' shoulder for balance. She gingerly removed the shotgun from his hands and crept towards the Witch.

"Careful!" Coach hissed. She shushed him.

"Who were you hiding from?" she asked, continuing her quiet, steady approach.

"The guns. The guns! There was one of /them/, in the lines, then more, and they started shooting. I hid in the bus, it was wrong, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Her voice warbled between the desperate moans of a terrified young woman and the ululating howl of a nightmare made flesh.

"It's ok," Rochelle cooed in a brittle, lilting whisper. "Don't worry. It's ok now." The Witch's head snapped upright.

"STAY AWAY FROM ME!" she screamed. Ellis lunged for a rifle, but the Witch didn't attack. Instead she scrambled backwards into the corner, her hands slipping and sliding over the swollen corpses. She stumbled into pile and wailed. "I'm sorry! I don't want to! I don't want it!" She struggled to her hands and knees, wicked claws piercing the dead flesh beneath her. "I'm sorry, I don't want to, I don't mean to, I'm sorry. I can feel it, it's everywhere in me, I thought I'd stop seeing but I can't stop seeing, but I can /feel/ it, I don't want to…"

"Jesus Christ." Rochelle's terror dissolved into horror and pity.

"Please," the Witch-girl pleaded. Her whimper was almost human. "I can't do it, it's a sin, I tried to do it anyway but I can't, I'm sorry, I shouldn't've hid, I should've stayed, I can't stop seeing and it's filling me up…" Rochelle took the final step forward and fired. Her hands were shaking; the shot wasn't perfect, but it was enough. The girl slumped forward, face-first onto the grisly pile. Rochelle managed a few backwards paces before her legs gave out. She and Nick slid to the floor in unison.

"Jesus Mary and Joseph," Nick said, still staring at the girl or Witch or whatever she'd been. A pair of absurdly bright green pants pooled around her waist. She'd been shrinking out of them. "I knew it had to be different for them, but… holy fucking shit. You ok, Ro?"

"I'm a hell of a lot better than she was." Already she sounded more like herself, shaken but firm. "Poor thing must've been here for a day or two like that." She pulled herself together, briskly wiping a stray tear from her cheek. "I wish we hadn't had to leave the rest of them alive. If they never really stop—" She didn't let herself finish the thought, pursing her lips and rising to fastidiously dust off her bloodstained jeans.

At least a few evacuees had made it past the checkpoint with their things. Clothes and trampled jewelry were scattered across the concrete floor. Ellis pulled a sateen bathrobe off the floor and laid it over the girl's body. "Yeah," he said to Rochelle, adjusting the edges to cover as many dead as possible. "I know exactly what you mean."

* * *

A perfectly framed tableau of fiery devastation laid beyond the fence: Cracked, charred foundations piled with burning timber. Dark, billowing columns rising in the distance. Day-old fires still flickering in scattered corners. They only had eyes for the centerpiece—a crumpled heap of glass and steel and wilting blades.

"This looks familiar."

"Yep."

"Not a zombie this time, though."

"Nope."

The four turned as one away from the smoldering wreckage, marching back into the winding ruin of the evac route. Fingers of acrid smoke chased them down the street, and were ignored.

There was nowhere else to go.


End file.
